I transitioned into teaching almost exclusively online a couple of years ago just because it is easier. While I don't mind teaching in person at a school or language center it has been my experience that these jobs generally are more headache than they are worth - at least at the level that I am qualified to teach. There are "good" jobs in Vietnam for teachers that are qualified internationally to teach but for those of us that don't have undergraduate or even better, a graduate degree in Education, we kind of get the "scraps" as far as job are concerned. They tend to be under-funded and poorly managed, if they are managed at all.
Working online opened up a lot of avenues for a person because you can specify what kind of teaching you want to be involved in. You can choose age-ranges and the level of English-speaking ability of the students. There are different pay-ranges for each and at least in the industry I am involved in, the youngest kids with the least amount of ability are best-paying, at least at the start.
For anyone who is just starting out in the field and doesn't have a rating or much experience in the field and especially with the company in question you kind of have to take whatever they offer you. This can suck at first because you never really know what you are going to get and it can be difficult. At least it takes place in your own living room and this is where Vietnam comes in handy. A great many of our students are from China so the time-zone of Vietnam works out really nicely.
Once you build up a reputation, which works similarly to an Uber, star-rating, you get opportunities to branch out a bit and choose what you want to do a bit more and this is likely similar to any other industry.
I wouldn't say that this job is for everyone and actually, I am glad it isn't because if everyone was doing it, there wouldn't be enough work for me to make a living. I've been doing it for more than 3 years and have an almost exclusively 5-star rating and now I have access to the much-coveted and well-paying "advanced conversational English" students. This group consists of students that have been with the company for a long time and the choice of which teacher they use is an informed one based on feedback that has been provided about you by past students. Everyone wants to teach this group but ultimately, unless a student chooses you, you can't do it.
I guess my profile and experience levels have crossed some sort of unofficial threshold because I started getting my first requests to do these gigs starting a few weeks ago. When the student contacts you to see if you are interested they have to provide a list of topics that they would like to talk about beforehand and you need to see if this is something that you could have a 30 minute discussion over. Beyond whether or not you have the knowledge of a particular topic or not, there really isn't any other prep-work that goes into it. These topics can be ANYTHING that the student wants and when you get in there it is just exactly what it says. It is a 30 minute conversation with a stranger about a topic. I've had "video games, soccer, and business meetings." The business meetings thing surprisingly was the easiest for me because I've been through plenty of them over the years.
The best part about this sort of education is that the students already have a very firm grasp on the language and they aren't looking to learn about ABC's and 123's, they are looking to refine their pronunciation and perhaps pick up an idiom or two. We, the teachers, are asked to not alter the way that we talk and to avoid doing "baby talk" that we would normally do with the students who have very limited language skills. So far, the conversations I have had have been ones where I rarely had to explain what something I said means, I was just there to make minor adjustments to how they say certain words.
I would say that unlike the other teaching jobs I have had this is actually kind of fun. Its been similar to just having a 30 minute conversation with a friend and that is how I and the students treat it. We just talk. There is no curriculum and while it seems like it would be stressful, the only real qualifications that you need is that you need to be able to talk endlessly about a wide-variety of topics. For example: The student that I had that wanted to talk about soccer knew a lot more about the various leagues of the world than I did. At first this kind of scared me but then I quickly realized that this didn't matter and it actually served a very good purpose because it meant that the student was actually doing most of the talking. This ended up being about various European teams that I couldn't have named a single player who is on the roster. The student took great joy in talking about basically everyone on the team and the manager, and I was just there to be interested and change or refine a word here and there. He was clearly a very dedicated learner and the next thing I knew the 30 minutes was up.
In the next few days I noticed that the same student had booked me for an additional 5 lessons so I guess I "nailed the interview," so to speak. I am hopeful that by getting good feedback from this one person means that I will be landing more jobs in this field because honestly, it is extremely easy if you an outgoing person that can talk about anything. I don't think I would be willing to take on a conversation about Cricket anytime soon or anything but who knows, the fact that I know nothing about the sport could be beneficial because the student would have to explain the complete basics of the sport to me in order for me to participate in it. I may even be genuinely interested to learn about it and being paid to learn something is probably pretty good.
I don't know what the future holds as far as this line of work is concerned but thus far, I really enjoy it and I can't really say that this is the case when I know I have a session lined up with 4 kids that barely understand anything I am saying to them and have to rely on the software to do a lot of the work for me.
I paid my dues to get to this point and I have been with the same company for several years now. This couldn't have come at a better time either because I was starting to get burned out on singing nursery rhymes with children who for the most part, were being forced to do the gig by their parents.
Not trying to be mean when I say this but am rather just stating a fact: If this seems like something that you would like to do it is very likely that you can't do it. Not because I am super-skilled or anything - I don't believe that I am - but because these jobs seem to only go to people with years of experience with the same company. I'm just happy that I finally qualified.