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Are you someone with an insatiable curiosity and great patience? Have your friends crowned you the knowledgeable one in your group? If your answer to these questions is yes, what are you waiting for? Jump on the tutoring bandwagon right away! 🚌
A tutor’s role goes way beyond teaching children the basics of grammar or maths. A tutor is responsible for the holistic development of their students. A tutor’s role is aptly summed up in Abraham Lincoln’s letter to his son’s tutor:
While the responsibility to pave students’ lives is exciting, it is crucial to carefully weigh the pros and cons of tutoring before choosing to become a tutor.
To save some of the research, we have compiled a list of the advantages and disadvantages of tutoring.
Pros of tutoring
One of the biggest advantages of tutoring is that it can help you make a massive difference to a student’s life. Some other good reasons to take up a role as a tutor are:
Flexibility
As opposed to teaching full-time physically in a school or at a student’s home, tutoring allows you to conduct sessions remotely through Zoom. This helps you save the time you’d spend commuting and allows you to conduct sessions at a time that’s convenient for you. You’re free to dedicate as much time to tutoring as you’d like. This allows you to work on other things and enjoy some well-deserved free time. 👪
Highly rewarding
One of the biggest causes of unhappiness in the professional world is working an unfulfilling job. However, tutoring is a highly rewarding profession that gives you the opportunity to dedicate your efforts to an important and fulfilling cause.
Good tutors play a major role in a child’s academic and personal development. As a tutor, you can help make the learning process fun and exciting for students and help them fulfil their potential. It can be incredibly fulfilling to watch your efforts start to pay off through your student’s improved grades, knowledge, and confidence.
Enhances your people skills
Being a tutor means working with kids of all age groups, from those in Key Stage 1 to those in university. You also get to regularly interact with parents to keep them updated with their kid’s progress. This helps you develop strong interpersonal skills.
Tutors also develop strong leadership skills because they are responsible for making decisions when it comes to lesson planning, keeping learners engaged, and setting the overall stage for a child’s education journey.
While tutoring is primarily about teaching, it’s also about building relationships with students and parents. Being able to build a rapport with people of all age groups can help you grow both personally and professionally.
Intellectual fulfilment and growth
Tutoring can be challenging at times but in all the right ways. Every student is different and has a varied pace and attitude towards learning.
Working with a variety of students makes tutoring fun and exciting. It helps you develop your skills and you’ll learn to adapt your teaching style to suit your different students. This means you are constantly learning to become more adaptable and how to improve your communication skills.
Tutoring will undoubtedly improve your confidence as an individual as you witness your efforts making a massive positive difference in your students’ lives.
Tutoring involves constantly learning, and tutors often learn more about a subject as they teach. This makes the profession incredibly exciting and intellectually rewarding.
Tutoring is fun!
As of 2021, worker burnout is at an all-time high, with over 40% of all working professionals facing mental and emotional stress due to their jobs. This makes it all the more important to opt for a profession you enjoy and where you can maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Tutors enjoy quality interactions with young minds and are a part of a positive and encouraging environment. It’s a job that’s not just about targets and results but a genuine human connection. If you are someone who loves children, tutoring will be a fun and rewarding career for you.
Check out a day in the life of GoStudent tutor Chloe to see how tutoring can fit into your lifestyle.
Accessibility
If you tutor with a platform like GoStudent, we do all the hard work for you. We focus on finding you students so that you can focus on what you do best - tutoring!
With us, you don’t need to waste time advertising your services or going to sessions physically. All you need is a device and a stable wifi connection. Once you have those in place, you’re all set to start teaching your favourite subjects.
Cons of tutoring
We’d be lying if we said there are no cons to tutoring. After all, every role has some cons, right?
Some tutors find it challenging to build a rapport with certain students, while others find the job less rewarding than they’d like. Here are some other cons of tutoring that you should consider before signing up:
Potentially odd hours
Private tuition usually supplements a student’s education at school. Therefore, tutoring sessions are often scheduled in the evening and/or on the weekends. Tutors may need to work around regular school time which can often mean working in the evenings and on weekends. These aren’t the most sociable working hours so it’s important to consider whether this would work for you as a tutor.
Finding your feet takes time
“It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.”
John Locke, Philosopher
One of the most important parts of being a tutor is finding a teaching method that works for both you and your students. This may take a while to develop and can involve a certain amount of trial and error.
A good tutor is expected to maintain a fine balance between activity-based and textual learning. New teachers may struggle with discovering a combination of the two that keeps students both engaged and interested in what’s being taught. Essentially, being a good tutor requires you to be flexible and to be able to connect with a diverse audience.
Need to be organised
It’s important for tutors to be extremely organised. They need to prepare lesson plans and think about new ways to engage learners. Apart from this, you need to be ready for your sessions on time. The best way to do this? Always aim to arrive at your call five minutes early. This allows you wiggle room if your laptop isn’t charged or your wifi isn’t working.
Exam times can be extremely successful for students and tutors alike. Tutors need to ensure their students are well-prepared so they can go into their exams feeling confident.
Fewer opportunities to scale-up
Tutoring part-time doesn’t offer as much professional scope as you’d like. Unlike full-time teaching jobs at schools, tutoring services do not function according to a set hierarchy and there’s not as much opportunity to work your way up the career ladder so to speak. Tutors work on a freelance basis. This means they need to learn how to file their taxes and take care of any other necessary paperwork.
Getting started
The one thing that most new tutors struggle with is getting students. It can be tiresome and time-consuming to advertise yourself on various different platforms in an attempt to find students. Acquiring enough students requires extensive marketing and it can often take a long time before you’re fully established. Tutors usually require help from a credible platform in order to make a living, and that’s where we come in.
Why should you choose GoStudent?
GoStudent gives you everything you need to conduct fun, activity-driven online sessions. Our platform offers numerous benefits to tutors, such as:
Flexible Scheduling
GoStudent tutors are free to schedule sessions whenever works best for them. We help you find students for your preferred time slots and you’re ready to get going as soon as you’re registered. This means that you don’t have to miss out on your social life in order to become a tutor with us!
No more admin
GoStudent handles the administrative hassle for you. Everything from applying for your Enhanced DBS Certificate to scheduling the sessions is taken care of by our team so you can invest your effort where it belongs - in the classroom.
GoStudent is a leading global tutoring platform that has over 15,000 tutors from across the globe. We offer best-in-class tutoring services in numerous subjects to thousands of students.
Whatever your area of expertise, we’d be thrilled to have you as part of the GoStudent community. So what are you waiting for? Register as a tutor now.
