$18/Hour Teaching English With No Qualifications

Lydia Carroll has an 8-minute video detailing the pros and cons of being a community tutor on iTalki…

iTalki is a language learning platform, where anyone can sign up and book online lessons with professional teachers or community tutors 💬

Lydia explains the difference…

Professional teachers have university degrees and generally charge a higher rate… Community tutors are simply native speakers of the language that they’re teaching… 

Community tutors generally provide less structure. For example, I mainly offer conversation practice.

So even if you have no teaching experience or qualifications, you can sign up to iTalki as a community tutor in whatever language you speak fluently.

Lydia is from Australia 🇦🇺 and signed up as an English language community tutor in April of 2022 (her profile). She has since taught more than 700 lessons on there.

She says in her video…

I started Italki when I was in Bali and now I’m in Australia. This winter I’ll be teaching from New Zealand and next year I plan to teach from the UK.

Over the course of almost a year I’ve increased my rate from USD $5/hour to $18/hour.

Italki does take a 20% fee though, so Lydia is ultimately left earning $14.40/hour.

In her video, Lydia lists some pros and cons of being a community tutor on iTalki.

Pros 👍

• You don’t need any formal qualifications.
• You don’t need any fancy equipment.
• Work for yourself, on your own schedule.
• Work as much or as little as you like.
• Meet amazing people from all over the world.
• Work from anywhere.
• Set your own rates.
• iTalki finds students for you.

Cons 👎

• Can take 1-2 weeks to get paid.
• You might need to pay for Zoom.
• Creepy guys being creepy.
• Accidentally accepting lesson requests from beginner-level students.
• Italki’s 20% fee.

You definitely won’t get rich teaching on iTalki, especially as a community tutor. But it can be a nice side hustle, especially if you like meeting and chatting with people from other cultures 🌎