The Ultimate Guide to Starting Your Career as a Freelance Language Teacher
Whether the economy is rocking, or whether things are looking a little shaky, there’s one thing that you can guarantee. People will always be looking to learn languages! And this trend is going nowhere.
With that in mind, we thought we’d condense more than a decade’s worth of language teaching experience into this 10 step guide to help you get started in a career as a freelance language teacher.
Straight out of University. Implementing this 10 step process correctly could have you making money from day 1. So what are we waiting for? There are students that need teaching!
Ten Steps to Becoming a Freelance Language Teacher
1. Choose language(s) you’d like to teach
This might be obvious. You may only speak English so decide to teach English as a foreign language (EFL). Or you may speak another language and decide to dedicate yourself to teaching that. Perhaps you studied a language e.g. French at Uni and feel like you’d like to continue using it to help others achieve their goals.
Ralf Meier delivers German lessons in London for us, and has this advice:
“It’s always easier to teach your own language of course. And I do that myself. But don’t forget that your experience learning another language can be extremely valuable to other learners who are starting the same journey that you embarked on all those years ago.”
If you speak more than 1 language, you may have to decide whether you want to specialise in teaching more than 1 language or stay focused and teach the language you’re best at. This is a personal choice. It’s up to you!
2. Start planning
There are so many different ways to teach languages. This guide is for those of you who would like to go the freelance route. Teaching either 1:1 or small groups off your own back and collecting your teaching fees directly from your students. Not usually connected to an institution or employer (though you can choose to work freelance and do this as well – see later).
All our network of language teachers are freelance teachers. They invoice us for their work just as they would do a private student.
To start, you will need to focus on how you want to deliver your lessons. Are you going to meet people for the lessons at their homes, offices, public places in your local area? Or are you going to teach purely online via platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Skype? Perhaps a mix of both would work for you. Or maybe you just don’t quite know yet. That’s ok, you can change things as you go.
The most important thing is to commit to taking action.
You will need to think about the types of students you would like to teach.
Do you love the energy and enthusiasm of young children?
Or do you prefer the (perhaps more) intelligent conversation that goes with teaching business executives or casual learner adults who are looking to learn in a more relaxed atmosphere?
Maybe helping teens and older children get through their school exams motivates you.
There is certainly no shortage of choice when it comes to planning who you are going to teach. Again, you can mix and match here. But we would highly recommend going for a niche group of students who you think you can help most and planning things around them. It will make you stand out as an expert. Rather than a Jack (or Jill) of all trades! It also cuts down time and expense buying textbooks and workbooks; as well as planning lessons and courses.
As the old saying goes: “If you appeal to everyone you appeal to no-one”
Now we’ve chosen which language(s) we’re going to teach and we’re crystal clear on who we want to be teaching, what now? Step 3, that’s what!
3. Start teaching for free / exchanging languages to gain valuable experience
This is not really for the reasons you would expect. Gaining experience is of course valuable to put on your CV for a potential employer. But as this is freelance teaching, your employer will be the (hopefully hundreds!) of satisfied students you teach (or their parents). They’re unlikely ever to ask for a CV.
This is more for you to get a final feel for teaching and a last chance to walk away and say “no this isn’t for me”. Better to decide this before you’ve invested your time and money in the next steps than decide once you’re up and running. You could have saved yourself months of work!
Ask around. Do you have friends/relatives who have always wanted to take up or improve the language you want to teach? At this point it doesn’t have to be the target group in your plan you made earlier, although if you can find some people in your target group to try out your teaching, even better.
If you’re still at Uni, is there any way you can help your fellow students with some free lessons? Make sure to ask them to write a review or testimonial of your teaching in exchange.
Bonus points for getting them to do a video review, you can use that in later steps for a massive impact.
Are you looking to learn another language? Pair up with somebody else at University and do a language exchange. You teach for an hour and then they teach you for an hour. Your University language centre should be able to help you with that. The key here is to ask around. And keep asking until you get the answers you need.
4. Get qualified (optional)
Whether you take this step really depends on the language you intend to teach and who are likely to be your students. It might come as a surprise, but the vast majority of language teachers (except for English as a foreign language, EFL, teachers) do not have any formal qualification to teach their language.
Firstly, let’s look at TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). If you’re not thinking about teaching English then you can skip ahead.
By far the industry standard is the Cambridge CELTA teaching qualification. This can be done intensively over 4 weeks, or extensively, over 6 months to a year. We definitely recommend the 4 week intensive. Make sure the course you choose is not distance learning, and contains at least 8 hours of observed teaching. The Trinity Cert TESOL is a popular alternative, though we would recommend the CELTA.
Try to avoid the weekend-type TEFL courses. There are a huge amount of weekend, or 160 hour, or distance learning TEFL courses out there. They usually don’t have anybody actually observe your lessons and provide feedback. And focus mainly on theory. You get little or no practice at teaching with real students, which is critical.
These courses can be useful if you’re still not sure if teaching is your thing. But even then, taking the step to provide free lessons yourself will help answer that question. This type of course could be useful if you’re wanting to finance your summer backpacking around the Far East. Or if you would like to teach abroad in a place where they have little or no choice in terms of native-speaking English teachers. But if you’re serious, stay away from these courses!
Having at least a Bachelor’s degree is important though and this is usually the absolute minimum. Better if it is in or covers your chosen language(s). Teaching degrees are also useful though again not a requirement.
For most languages, there are add-on teaching courses that you can do (similar to the Cambridge CELTA for EFL) that prepare you for the commercial aspect of teaching that language, often to adults at commercial language schools globally, but there are younger learner courses as well. For French there are various FLE certificates. For Spanish, there are ELE courses you can take. Most of the commonly learned languages have their equivalent of one of these qualifications.
We must stress that these courses are all optional, and are usually more appropriate if you are planning to teach your chosen language long-term at a higher or further education teaching institution such as the Alliance Francaise (French), the Instituto Cervantes (Spanish) or the Goethe Institut (German)) or a University.
Even then though, experience is usually valued over formal qualifications and there are myriad ways to get into teaching at these institutions without these qualifications.
So to sum up, qualifications are not the be-all-and-end all.
For teaching English as a foreign language you will need a CELTA as a minimum. For teaching any other language you will need a good, competent ability (at least B2-C1 level or higher) and a Batchelor’s degree. Better if the degree is in teaching or something to do with your chosen language. Though this isn’t a deal-breaker. Any degree will do.
For other languages, you might want to have a plan to get one of these add-on qualifications later down the line once you are more established. It will definitely add value and help you stand out from the crowd.
As stated in the advice on the Cambridge CELTA. If you do want to pick an add-on course, choose a course that has at least 8 hours of observed teaching. You need to cut your teeth on real students and get valuable feedback from an experienced trainer. Otherwise it can be a waste of money.
5. Get organised
To succeed in the world of freelance work you need to be organised. There is no employer giving you your paycheck every month. It’s on you. Some people love this freedom and thrive. Some people prefer to have other people worry about that for them.
Decide how much you’re going to charge
Before teaching your 1st lesson you need to decide how much you’re going to charge. How much to charge is probably one of the most difficult decisions you will make here.
We could have written an entire post on how much to charge but let’s first deal with some basics and dispel some myths.
– Being cheap or the cheapest will not make you successful
– Higher hourly rate = higher quality in the eyes of your student(s)
– That said, there is a ceiling as to what most people can or will pay (how many people can afford a Ferrari even though they’d love to own one?)
– The more you charge the fewer people will be able to take you up on your offer
– The more you charge the less you will need to work to make the same money (if lifestyle is important to you, which it should be, it’s worth thinking about this)
– If you are just starting out with no track record it will be difficult to charge the top rates
– It’s easier to slash your prices than put them up. Be EXTREMELY careful about lowering your rates or starting out low. It can take a minute to slash your prices, it can take a lifetime to put them back up. We’ve learnt this the hard way.
There is a balance to be struck here. You want to charge market rate (or higher) but you also want to attract people to try your services as you are just starting out.
It is very easy to find out how much other tutors/teachers are charging per hour to teach your chosen language. Just perform a search for teachers of your chosen language on one of the tutoring marketplaces and see what prices come up. Highest, lowest, and everything in-between. We will see more about this in the next step.
If you’re going to be teaching online you will need a laptop or computer with a reliable, stable internet connection.
This is a must.
Don’t even think you can use your phone or tablet computer and get away with it. A good quality microphone and speakers combo or a headset are a must as well.
You may also think about investing in a high quality webcam for a professional, polished finish to your lessons. It is worth investing in this equipment beforehand if you don’t already have it. Just having a good microphone will help you come across clearly and professionally. Just remember, we’re teaching languages here.
Clear, understandable communication is sacrosanct.
Get your admin in order
If you’re going to be teaching freelance you have a certain amount of time before you are required to register as self-employed by the tax authorities (HMRC in the UK).
You will need to keep records of all your income from freelance work as well and declare your income at the end of each year.
It’s best to get this organised properly before you start so it doesn’t come as a huge administrative nightmare the day before the tax reporting deadline.
9 times out of 10 you can do this yourself with no real headaches. You know yourself best! If you know you’re going to have a panicked, chaotic time trying to find all your income and expenses before the tax deadline you may want to consider a bookkeeper to help you just to make things easier.
You may also want to decide how you’re going to invoice for your services. If you’re using tutoring marketplaces they often do all of that for you, including taking payments.
They will take a cut of the money but it really reduces your admin to almost nothing. Some require you to pay a ‘finder’s fee’ but then you get to keep all further course fees and keep track of your own income.
We would definitely suggest getting on as many of these platforms as possible and seeing which work best for you. If you’re accepting payments yourself you will need to decide how best to deal with collecting the money.
Accepting payments
Some marketplaces will do this for you. Their client, your student, will pay by card or bank transfer to the marketplace. The marketplace will take their cut, then release the funds to you once the session has been approved by the client.
If the student is paying you directly the best thing is to accept payments either in cash in advance, or by bank transfer.
You don’t necessarily need a business or separate bank account for this. You just need to keep track of the income related to your teaching.
We do not recommend offering a ‘Pay as you go’ type service. It can be really difficult to plan and gain any financial security if your students are just paying you for the next lesson (which they might not turn up to).
Students often won’t turn up, and students will cancel. It goes with the territory. To maintain any hope of keeping your freelance teaching going as a career you need financial security and regularity and predictability of income.
Let me just repeat that: You need financial security and regularity and predictability of income.
The best option is to offer ‘blocks of sessions’ for a set price in advance. You can offer a free trial lesson if you like. Or even just a free intro meeting, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a formal lesson.
We don’t recommend discounting at all. It can make your offer look cheap, low quality and may encourage the student to further haggle with you. Which isn’t nice. It can start to feel like the students don’t value your teaching at all!
Your Cancellation Policy
Never, ever, EVER, allow students to pay you after sessions, or at the end of a month or block of sessions. It can cause huge problems if they don’t pay or pay slowly.
We’ve even been in situations where students have tried to haggle the prices down AFTER they’ve had the sessions! Get the money off them before you start. And have a written cancellation policy of 24 hours that you strictly enforce. End of story.
This can seem really harsh, especially if you’re a highly relational person and want to avoid the kind of conflict that can occur when you need to enforce the cancellation policy. Thing is, we’ve really learned the hard way that there is no other way to assure security of income so you can sustain this in the long run.
It’s always possible to look at things on a case by case basis as well. So if you really feel your student had a legitimate excuse to miss the lesson you might want to waive the cancellation. Especially if it is a 1st offence.
Just don’t let it happen more than once! And don’t let your students know you’re a soft touch. Even if you are.
Other things to consider
Smaller things like getting yourself a specific email address for your tutoring and/or a professional looking website can really set you apart from others.
These aren’t a must, especially if you’re just starting out. But if you are really serious and want to start attracting your own clients (and keep all the money they pay) then having your own real estate where you advertise your services can really help.
6. Sign up to tutoring marketplaces
If you’re in the UK, here are some tutoring marketplaces we suggest you take a look at.
They each have a slightly different way in which they work. Some ask students to pay a ‘finder’s fee’ for connecting them with a teacher. Others take a cut of your hourly rate. Others charge the client a monthly fee and are free to the teacher.
Just a warning: The tutoring marketplaces are hugely competitive. You’ll need all of the following tips to help you to succeed. Even if you know you’re good!
If you’re based in the UK, here are our favourite tutoring marketplaces (in no particular order):
Superprof – We like this site. Clients and students have to pay a monthly fee to become a member and have access to the tutors on the site. It’s free for teachers to set up a profile.
Once students have signed up they can contact any teachers they like. You do your own deal with the student and all the course payments are yours.
They don’t take course fees on the site, it’s up to you to arrange bank transfer or cash payment with your students. Just as if they were your own private student.
Tutorful – These guys will take a cut of your hourly rate for every lesson but will make your administration super easy.
There are lots of teachers on here, so standing out can be difficult until you’ve got reviews and worked a few hours as they track your hours on your profile page.
Useful for the client as they’ll see who are most active. And good for you if you solely want to use this platform.
Preply – This is very similar to tutorful. They take a cut of every hour you teach and make your admin virtually zero.
They have less of a UK slant though so you’re up against teachers from everywhere if you’re teaching online. You do, however have access to students all over the world as well.
Italki – If you want to teach languages online this is your site. They’ll match you up with basically anyone anywhere for online lessons. They’ll take a cut of your hourly rate but make your admin easier as a result.
We’ve found that charging what you think you’re worth can sometimes be tricky here as you’re up against a huge amount of teachers. Especially for the popular languages.
First Tutors – Languages – These guys have been around for a long long time. Long before the others here.
It’s free to put a profile up as a teacher, and it’s free for students to contact and speak to teachers. The student only pays a ‘finder’s fee’ to release the tutor’s contact details once both have agreed.
Messaging can sometimes be painful though as messages may be checked and moderated in case there are exchanges of contact details before the fee has been paid. In our experience, this can make the whole experience feel a little unnatural.
That said, once the student has paid the finder’s fee (usually between £10 – 20) the student is yours. You keep all further course fees.
So we know where to put up our profile, now it’s time to create a tutoring profile on these sites.
Your teaching profile – Best practice
1. Photo
First of all, upload one. We’ve been on a lot of tutoring platforms over the years. Most modern platforms don’t allow you to complete your account without a photo, which is good. But some platforms do, and it’s amazing to see the sheer quantity of profiles without one single photo of the tutor. Don’t be that person! Get a photo uploaded.
Make sure the photo is professional. It doesn’t have to be over professional. But err on the side of professional. We’ve seen photos from tutors ranging from too casual (think holiday photos, having a beer with the lads/lasses on holiday, walking the dog etc.), to mugshots at the local nick!
Put yourself in your student’s shoes.
Would you do business with the person in the photo?
If no, find a better photo. If yes, perhaps try asking family and friends what they think as well. And get them to be honest.
Any photo you upload should be high quality, and the right way round. It sounds really silly to mention this but we’ve seen tonnes of low-quality, selfie-type photos as profile images on these sites. These are not terrible, but there are so many, how are you going to stand out?
We’ve also seen quite a few images that have been uploaded upside down or on their side. What does that tell your student about your abilities if you can’t even take and upload a simple head and shoulders professional photo of yourself the right way round?
In conclusion, spend some time on your photo. It will be the first thing a prospective student looks at, and will make or break your profile, so get it right, or they may be on to the next profile.
2. Bio
Understand this. Your prospective student has probably already been overloaded with lists and lists of tutors and profiles.
Think Where’s Wally meets Online dating.
We have a 15 second rule here. You should be able to quickly read your whole bio in 15 seconds (max), 10 seconds is better.
Your prospective student is going to be skimming your profile, not reading it word for word. They may have already looked at quite a few already.
It should be long enough so the prospective student has a good idea about you and your teaching. But brief enough that they don’t just skim quickly and skip to the next person.
Avoid huge blocks of text. 1 or 2 short paragraphs is enough. Experiment with bullet points as well. We won’t go as far as to recommend you just write bullet points because that can appear impersonal and perhaps a little cold and/or rushed.
You need your personality, professionalism and passion to come out in your writing. But it needs to be concise if it’s going to be read. You may need to write several drafts and get friends or family to read it to help you improve it.
Short and sweet is the key here. It is an art to master. And in truth. Not many teachers get it right. We’d estimate around 5-10% of profiles get the balance right between brevity, personality and professionalism.
Everybody else’s profiles are either too long (very common). Too short. Or the right length but not written in a friendly, professional, personal enough way.
3. Experience and qualifications
Here you can definitely use bullet points. Put all your relevant qualifications and experience. Leave out stuff that’s irrelevant like that summer spent doing work experience, or your student job working in a shop. Keep things on topic and relevant. The prospective student is looking for any excuse to skip to the next teacher.
4. Videos
Some of these teaching marketplaces allow for you to upload videos. Either a video promoting yourself and your teaching. Or a video of testimonials with satisfied students. Remember the students you taught for free earlier? Hopefully you got them to get on camera and tell everyone how good you are!
Check the website you’re uploading your profile to. If they allow uploading of video. Do it. No questions. It might slow your progress completing your profile by a few days, but you will DESTROY the competition.
If we need teachers at short notice and are browsing profiles we will almost automatically connect with a teacher who has made the time to upload a video. It shows a real desire to go the extra mile and stand out from the crowd.
99% of profiles won’t have a video on so you know that you’re in the top 1% of profiles just by spending a little extra time uploading a video.
As we said before, the best video is either a video of you. Introducing yourself. A prospective student won’t be able to get you out of their mind if you have a video, as it will interrupt the lists and lists of boring profiles they’ve been wading through.
Testimonials from happy students are a good idea as well, or both an introduction and testimonials. Give it a go. You’ll love the results.
5. Reviews
Now if you’ve followed the plan this far good work! Hopefully you collected some written (or video) testimonials from the students you were teaching for free. You can use the text area in your bio to add 2 or 3 of those.
We suggest 2 or 3 short, well written testimonials from your students. Don’t make them up, or we’ll know. And so will your potential student.
In truth, your potential student is going to skim very quickly through things. And they certainly aren’t going to read huge long testimonials from a dozen students.
A mistake some teachers make is to copy/paste huge long testimonials from every student they’ve had to show how great they are. It’s sloppy and doesn’t help the student make a decision.
Choose a maximum of 3 brief testimonials that highlight you and why you and your teaching are great. Longer than: “Great teaching”, but shorter than a huge essay! Getting the balance right is key again here.
They need to be long enough to really convey value, but short enough that they’ll be read.
Getting your 1st responses.
When you’re new, it might take a while before you get your first response from a potential student. But if you’ve done the previous steps correctly you will have given yourself the best possible chance.
Pro Tip 1: Read and respond to all enquiries immediately or as soon as possible. The most responsive teachers win all the new students. Do you remember the last time you messaged somebody when you were interested in buying something and they never got back to you? Or got back to you days afterwards. That’s no good! You had probably found what you were looking for by then.
For bonus points, respond within 5 minutes of their enquiry. Survey after survey has shown that you are 80% more likely to get a new student or sell anything if you respond to an enquiry within 5 minutes.
Obviously, you won’t be answering them in the middle of the night or while you’re busy teaching. What we usually do is to have a rule that we get back to all enquiries as soon as possible if it’s during the working day. Outside of working hours (9am to 5pm) get back to them as early as you can the next working day. Be as flexible as you can on this one. You will find a rhythm and routine that works for you. Just remember, your students are much more likely to go with the teacher they connect with first so responding quickly is key.
Pro Tip 2: Some of these platforms have dedicated apps for your phone that will push any messages to you immediately. We strongly suggest either downloading these. Or perhaps better. Set up a dedicated email address for your teaching, use that for messages from all the tutoring platforms and connect it to your phone so you never miss an enquiry and can respond like lightening.
Pro Tip 3: Follow up if they don’t respond. The student has taken the time to view your profile and send a message through. You’ve taken the time to thoughtfully respond to them and perhaps ask a question for clarification.
And then nothing…
set yourself a reminder to message them back in a week or so to ask if they are still looking.
Looking for a teacher most probably got put to the bottom of their priorities list and they will thank you for following up.
There are some people who may have already gone with another teacher but that’s not always the case. The fortune is in the follow up. And we’ve proved that time and time again using this method.
Depending on how serious you think the enquiry was initially, you may want to try a 3rd follow up as well. Use your discretion on this one. The more you do it the better feel you will get for how often and when to follow up.
6. Log in regularly (at least once a day if you can)
This may seem like a weird tip, but like most things online these days, the marketplaces are algorithm-driven. Tutors who are more engaged on the platform are bumped up the rankings. They take signals like last login and number of logins seriously when looking at how active tutors are.
7. Teach, teach, teach
So you’ve followed best practice and got some fantastic profiles up on the tutoring marketplaces. People are contacting you and you’re getting back to them quickly and professionally.
Now it’s time to teach and gain some experience. Teach as much as you can in the beginning. Put yourself out for a few months. Both to gain experience and so you can mine your students for reviews on the platform.
Over 80% of teacher profiles on these tutoring marketplaces have ZERO reviews.
Put yourself in a potential student’s shoes. Are you going to take a punt on the teacher with no reviews, or the one who charges similar with a page full of positive reviews and professional responses thanking the students for the reviews?
8. ASK for reviews and then respond to the reviews
This can be where it gets difficult for some teachers. Especially if you’re just starting out. Often the platforms will reach out automatically to your students and ask for then to leave a review. Thing is. 80% of the time they don’t!
Think of the last time you got an email asking for you to review some purchase. What did you do? Did you leave that review?
Perhaps you did.
Most people would either ignore the email or put it off until later, and later never comes.
This is where you come in. You need to ask your student personally to leave the review — and follow up with them about it. If they really do like you they will be happy to help in any way they can. You just need to ask.
Set a calendar reminder to check and remind them each lesson if they haven’t done it. Some people might find this pushy, but actually your student will be happy you reminded them. You could even make it the focus of an exercise in one of your lessons.
If the website allows responses to reviews then respond to the review in a friendly, professional way once it’s been left.
Anyone looking at your profile will see you clearly care about your students to take the time to respond, and that you’re active on the platform.
In their mind you are likely to respond to them kindly and professionally if they have an enquiry as well.
9. Rinse and repeat
Success is built through good foundations. Excellent execution (e.g. your excellent teaching), and continuous repetition and improvement. Think of each lesson as an opportunity to improve on the previous lesson. What could you have improved about your last lesson? How did the student(s) react to certain activities, things you did? Were these reactions good or bad?
Ditch the bad, double-down on the good.
You’ll keep improving and you’ll get there. Keep asking for reviews.
Studies show that 10 reviews is the optimum.
Think about your last online purchase. Did you read the reviews? Statistically, there’s a 96% chance you did, and a 96% chance you only read the first 5. And a 1% chance you read past review number 10.
Some people read past review number 10. But they are in the minority. This makes your job easier at least!
When you get to 10 reviews that really is the holy grail.
It’s not like you can then kick back and relax. But you’ve reached that point where you’ll be respected on the platform, and the work will start to come to you. (Provided your reviews are positive of course!)
10. Widen your net
While these tutoring platforms are a great place to get started. Some teachers even set up hugely successful and rewarding careers just using these to acquire students. There are other places you can pitch your services to depending on the road you want to go down.
Before going down this particular rabbit hole though it’s important for you to have an excellent, up to date, relevant CV (hint: it should have lots of teaching experience in. If you’ve followed the previous steps carefully and have been teaching for at least 6 months to a year you’ll know how to get that.)
Although an up to date CV is something you don’t need on a tutoring marketplace it will definitely be required if you’re looking to apply to a more traditional ‘bricks and mortar-type’ teaching institution, or even an national or international language teaching agency like ourselves.
Here are some ideas of other places you could experiment with to keep your teaching hours up:
Local language schools or other institutions that teach languages
It’s impossible to list all the potential institutions and schools you could apply to. A simple search around your local area for language schools should bring up some interesting results.
Language schools and teaching institutions often take on extra staff on a contractual basis to teach extra classes they may have.
That means you can fit these around the work you have going on with your private students. As they will often take you on as a freelancer as well it’s a lot more flexible and laid back compared to being taken on as a full staff member.
Local, national, or global language tutoring agencies
Agencies such as ourselves have thousands of emails, phone calls and applications for work from freelance language teachers every year. As a result, it’s very competitive to get work. Oftentimes, you may be added to the database and have to wait until work opportunities come up.
Work is always ad-hoc and sporadic at language agencies of any size, so relying singly on this route for your income is not recommended at all.
We would, however, recommend adding agencies to your mix of clients if you’re serious about teaching and plan to be in this for the long term (3 to 5 years or more). Our teaching database covers a number of countries.
The most successful teachers teach the common languages and are available in highly populated areas with thriving business communities and high levels of wealth.
Some of our teachers have been with us for years and years.
The kind of regular, ongoing work and security (cancellation policies, longer courses etc) that you can get through an agency are a huge bonus of working this way. Most reputable agencies will pay you quickly and deal with all the financial side of things for you as well.
Any issues can usually be resolved through the agency as well, so adding this into your teaching mix can result in quite a bit of ‘easy money’ compared to your private clients.
So we’re there, let’s just quickly recap the 10 steps (pro tip: print these tips off and stick them on your wall!)
1. Choose language(s) you’d like to teach
2. Start planning
3. Start teaching for free / exchanging languages to gain valuable experience
4. Get qualified (optional)
5. Get organised
6. Sign up to tutoring marketplaces
7. Teach, teach, teach
8. ASK for reviews
9. Rinse and repeat
10. Widen your net
Good luck with things, and we wish you all the very best with your language teaching career.
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Anthony Ash
A polyglot and international traveller. Anthony speaks 6 languages and loves sharing his passion of language learning through his writing.
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