Tips for Advancing Your Career as an Online Tutor
It’s not very common for people to talk about career development for tutors. And when the issue is brought up, it’s often in the context of getting a teaching certificate.
However, this advice doesn’t apply to a lot of us. First of all, some of us are already certified, and others might have trouble getting certified for any number of reasons.
So what other options are there? Below, we’ll go over five ways to develop a career as a tutor — all without certification.
1. Specialize
One way to develop your career is to specialize in something. The most popular specialization for tutors is test prep, because as long as there are tests, people will need help passing them.
To give you an idea of how to do this, let’s assume you want to specialize in IELTS. You’d want to:
- get familiar with the structure of the test with these free practice exams.
- understand how the tests are evaluated. For this, you could take the official IELTS Teacher Training Program (free), which will train you to think like an examiner.
- check out test prep books and courses to see how they prepare students. We recommend our free IELTS speaking materials, designed by a teacher with over a decade of experience teaching IELTS classes.
Another popular specialization for online tutors is Business English. After all, there’s no shortage of business professionals looking to boost their career by improving their English.
Business English involves teaching students email and phone etiquette in addition to language used in meetings, reports, negotiations, interviews and other professional situations. You can start with these free resources:
- Cambridge’s Business English test
- This online course or this online textbook on Business English communication
Finally, online teachers for kids are also highly sought after. The main difficulty with teaching kids online is keeping them engaged. However, if you do this well, you’re guaranteed to have very grateful parents who’ll introduce you to more parents, ensuring a steady pool of students.
If you’re interested in specializing in English for kids, we recommend taking the following online courses:
2. Broaden Your (Teaching) Horizons
In addition to (or instead of) specializing, some tutors find it helpful to do the opposite: expand their teaching scope.
Many certification courses can help you do this by giving you a solid foundation in English teaching. But did you know that even if you don’t get certified, you can still take certification courses for free?
A great option is Arizona State University’s courses on Coursera. For example, their TESOL certification series includes several courses on different aspects of teaching.
You can take the units in the course that are most relevant to online tutoring (like one on listening, speaking and pronunciation or another on teaching language online) and ignore those that you don’t need.
Just keep in mind that the free “audit” versions of the courses don’t give you access to graded materials, such as the answers to certain quizzes.
3. Gain More “Hard Knowledge”
As a tutor, there are probably things about your job that spark your curiosity or specific things you want to get better at.
For example, many of our tutors would like to get better at teaching pronunciation and explaining grammar. After all, students will ask us questions about these things even during conversation lessons.
So gaining the “hard knowledge” that makes us better at explaining technical aspects of language can help us stand out.
But how do we do this?
- Find tutorials on YouTube: YouTube has plenty of useful tutorials from expert teachers.
- Take online courses: You’d be surprised at the variety of online courses available. Simply do a search for the technical aspect of teaching you'd like to learn.
- Learn applied linguistics: Applied linguistics courses cover the essential technical knowledge language teachers need. You can start with this one or check out the programs of universities with top-ranked linguistics programs to find the best books to read.
Last but not least, don't forget to browse the posts we have here on the Engoo Tutor’s Blog, where we offer tips and strategies for a variety of tutoring situations.
4. Improve Your Soft Skills
If you’re not into hard knowledge, you may be interested in developing your soft skills. Soft skills won’t just help you with online tutoring; they’re also transferable to a range of other professions.
Some soft skills you can work on are:
- Cross-cultural communication: Cross-cultural communication is at the heart of tutoring students who live thousands of kilometers away. We cover it occasionally on our blog, but there are also free courses like this one on intercultural competency.
- Storytelling: Storytelling is a useful skill in many fields, and it can definitely help you to be a more effective tutor. To learn more, take this free course: Fundamentals of Storytelling in Education for Teachers and Trainers.
- Coaching: Being a tutor is sometimes more like coaching than teaching. If you want to become a better coach, check out this free course from Imperial College London.
- Counseling: Students often open up to foreign language teachers about their personal issues, and tutors are no exception. If you want to be better equipped to help your students, check out some basic courses on counseling.
5. Learn a Language Yourself
Finally, there’s no better way to put yourself in your students’ shoes than by learning a language yourself.
You can pick a language you’ve always been interested in, but it’s even better if you pick the one that your students speak. For example, if the majority of your students are Russian, and you study it yourself, you’ll realize how different the languages are and better empathize with your students’ learning struggles.
Sharing a few (poorly-pronounced) words here and there in Russian during the lesson can also make your student feel at ease. After all, hearing your mistakes will help them realize that they’re not so bad after all!
There are plenty of free language-learning resources, so we won’t introduce them here. They all have different approaches, so search for the ones that suit your learning style.
📌 Takeaways
To sum up, here are five ways you can develop your career as a language tutor:
- Specialize in test prep, business English, kids English or anything that interests you.
- Broaden your horizons by taking online courses.
- Gain hard knowledge to become better at explaining technical aspects of language.
- Work on soft skills that will transfer to many other careers.
- Go through the process of learning a language yourself.
Good luck on your journey!
And if you haven’t already, join us as an Engoo tutor by applying here.
