I saw this comment recently on Reddit from a user asking whether it's to teach privately or work for a company when going abroad to live and teach a language.
This is a great question, so here's a full response explaining three of the best reasons to teach privately and one of the biggest cons ...
Private vs. Employed
If you’re thinking of getting into teaching because it’s a great way to travel and see the world and you’re wondering whether you’re better off going 100% private and finding your own students, or getting a teaching job at a school then this post is for you.
Reason 1: Live and travel wherever you want:
Secondly, when you’re teaching privately online and not for a local school, you have the immediate freedom to live and travel wherever you want while continuing to work and earn an income.
You don’t have to deal with getting days off and vacation time approved to go and travel somewhere nor worry about travelling affecting your income if you chose to run your classes while you’re travelling.
This reason won’t apply to everyone, I understand many of you might be settled geographically and not looking to travel, and that’s totally fine.
But I see a lot of younger teachers wanting to quit their 9-5 and use online teaching as a way to travel and go live somewhere else in the world, and teaching privately is an amazing way to fund that experience without the restrictions and limitations of local teaching role.
Reason 2: No visa cancellation
This third reason is oddly the least talked about but super important - having the legal autonomy to be where you want to be.
When you teach for a school in another country they’re likely going to sponsor a work visa for you.
And if they begin imposing unfair working conditions on you and you don’t accept them, you don’t really have any recourse to fight back.
The second they fire you, it invalidates your visa and you’re forced to leave the country. They have an extra level of control over you.
I'm NOT saying that all schools in other countries that hire teachers are bad and would exert this control over you.
But, in my experience from being involved in online teaching communities and from teaching English at a school, this happens way more often than you’d think.
But when you teach privately, as long as you’re keeping yourself legal in any country you’re in (which is much easier now thanks to Digital Nomad visas), then it’s easier than ever to legally live and work in whatever country you want without ever being forced to leave prematurely due to a disgruntled employer.
Reason 3: Larger income
When teaching privately, you can/should be earning at a minimum 2-3x more than you would be in a school.
Obviously, schools have tons of expenses like management, overhead, utilities, physical materials, rent, all of that stuff which eats into their profit margins.
But you don’t have to pay all that as a private teacher so more of that lesson money stays in your pocket.
Plus, the more demand you build for your lessons by marketing yourself, the more you can charge.
As a former private, online English language teacher, I was charging up to 50$ an hour because I was able to build up huge demand for my lessons through social media to the point where I was getting up to 35 requests for my lessons per month.
That averaged out to over 5,000 USD/month,plus I earned more by selling my own digital language resources which is something a school likely won’t let you do, since you’d be selling it to their students.
The main downside
Now, the largest obstacle to teaching privately online - finding your own private students.
Everything I’ve talked about sounds great - just get a bunch of students and charge a bunch of money and they’ll buy up your lessons.
Of course, that’s not how it works.
The major benefit of working for a school is that you don’t need to market yourself, students are handed to you and everything including scheduling and payments is all done for you.
When you teach privately, it’s all on you to get your own private students, to market yourself, to be BOTH a teacher AND a business owner at the same time.
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