Anyone know if any online teaching companies that aren't bad to work for?

I have heard itutor is ok.

You are not looking for a "decent" company, but one that pays your dream salary... 

Cambly

 

if you have relevant qualifications and experience it's quite easy to get a job with a 'decent' EFL organisation.

Go onto itutor website and try to find out how much they pay.  They don't tell you, which is a red flag to me.  Why are they so secretive? Not a good advert for developing a working relationship with them. There are others. 

Here's my experience.

 

Awhile back I auditioned with VIPKid, the big one for Chinese kids. They pay about $9 USD an hour. As I've heard others say, their requirements are quite strict. They want you to be a clown. Animated, bursting with energy. Their coaches kept telling me, more smiling, more cheering, etc. I thought I had plenty, otherwise I wouldn't have made it through these years in Thailand. Guess I wasn't smoking enough crack.

 

I then tried signing up with Cambly. I uploaded my documents for verification, as they said they give preference to certs and high level degrees. Oh wow, I should be a shoe in. But this was when the virus first got going. I soon found I wasn't the only guy doing this, as they first said "setting up our new tutors is taking longer than usual", then finally something like "we must protect the success of our existing tutors, by limiting our amount of onboarding". Haha, oh well.

 

Thank God my school has since had us doing online teaching, until the kids begin returning in July.

I currently work for 2 due to covid.

First Future. This company teaches in state schools in china as well as 1v1. They project you and the platform onto the smart board in the class. You teach a whole class of 20 to 30. How you manage such a big group is used with the platform where you pick particular students to do single, pair, team activities. Its quite good. But the volume of work is low. As previously stated here. Half of the world's teachers are currently online.

The 2nd is iTutor. It is a good company to work for, but has a dress code. Plus you must print or project their logo on the background. The volume of work with them is great and you teach mainly adults in china.

The entry requirements for both is strict and getting harder by the day due to the amount of people trying online teaching.

If you try iTutor, I have a referral code you can use.      DC5C

Good luck.

2 hours ago, Swiss1960 said:

You are not looking for a "decent" company, but one that pays your dream salary... 

Why such an answer? If you've got nothing to say, just don't do it. 

Cambly pay $10 an hour and is a fully flexible platform. They require a degree cert, but not necessarily a teaching cert, although it helps. What I like about Cambly is being able to specialise, in teaching adult aviation students only and you are allowed to be very specific about who you will and will not teach.  Teaching kids is out for me, far too much like hard work, so I set a lower age limit of 16 for my students.  

I left my B&M in Myanmar in 2018 to teach online full-time.  I do not teach for any of the big Chinese employers because IMHO, they are <insert your choice of expletives here>.  Instead, I teach privately, listing my profile on the iTalki website.  I am fully (7 days/week, 6 hours+ per day), booked up until early August with young students in many countries around the world, charging $22/hour and paying iTalki a 15% fee for their booking engine, payment system and online classroom app.  I teach Science, English, Robotics, French, Arduino software...

1 hour ago, Raphus said:

I currently work for 2 due to covid.

First Future. This company teaches in state schools in china as well as 1v1. They project you and the platform onto the smart board in the class. You teach a whole class of 20 to 30. How you manage such a big group is used with the platform where you pick particular students to do single, pair, team activities. Its quite good. But the volume of work is low. As previously stated here. Half of the world's teachers are currently online.

The 2nd is iTutor. It is a good company to work for, but has a dress code. Plus you must print or project their logo on the background. The volume of work with them is great and you teach mainly adults in china.

The entry requirements for both is strict and getting harder by the day due to the amount of people trying online teaching.

If you try iTutor, I have a referral code you can use.      DC5C

Good luck.

I have/had been teaching with First Future for many years. At first it was great. Good bookings, good students, good management and all round good service. I had 90% plus student satisfaction, high end assessments from the company and good bonuses.

 

Then the management changed. There is a young guy in charge that seems hell bent of profits alone. There has been a huge influx of new teachers with names that, I imagine, are Eastern European. Obviously they do not get paid as much as native speakers. With this influx I, and some other native English speaking teachers I know, saw a quick decline in bookings. 

 

I once had an internet problem. I missed one 25 minute class. I finally got online and explained the situation. I was fined in excess of $40. I watched the video of the substitute teacher. I think he was Croatian. It was awful. The student, who I had been teaching for 2 months, spoke better than the teacher. I questioned this with the boss but he was not interested.

 

Sadly, this seems to be the way things are going with many companies. They are going for quantity over quality.

Online teaching is the land of white privilege.  You get white guys from Romania, Russia, Turkey and South Africa that get can barely speak a word of English but they get accepted.  However brown/black guy from UK or America doesn't get pass the interview.  Ridiculous.

 

The only one I had success with was Italki and then they banned me with no pay for talking about Donald Trump in a thread.  The thread was created by someone else and had been up for a few days.  If you praise the orange you stay if you call him a puppet you get banned.

 

So now I have started my own company and it is going surprisingly well.

 

 

Don Lee and Co. Mostly Korean businessmen. $40\hr. 

There are many I know of that pay $25-30.

 

7 hours ago, 2009 said:

I have heard itutor is ok.

I've heard someone offered $2/hour.

I was reprimanded by the #### at vip for having white walls, and had not even yet been hired.  I wasted about three hours of my time, and just took my losses, while others have been strung along for months without any kind of compensation.  They, and many Thai schools, are the kind of people that need to pay first, before I will work for them.  Economic downturns are usually bad for education gigs.  I noticed it after 9-11 as a substitute teacher, as well as 2009.