Tutoring Side Hustle: Ten Steps to Making Money
Tutoring side hustle: Do it online (maximize your profits!).
10 Steps to a Tutoring Side Hustle
Not every side hustle has such intangible rewards as tutoring. If you want to make money, find gratification in successfully teaching a subject and can put the picture together, you can find rewarding work in tutoring.
If you’ve just finished college or you’re raising kids at home, a tutoring side hustle can make you those extra bucks, work when you want, or escape a bad workplace. Here are the steps to success:
- Understand Flexibility
- Discover Where the Money is
- Find a Subject Niche
- Obtain a Speciality
- Brush Up on Knowledge
- Open a Business Checking Account
- Identify where the Students Are
- Market your skills
- Ask for Referrals
- Learn about Online Tutoring
Is Being a Tutor a Good Side Hustle?
Tutoring is a merit-based side hustle, so it can be good money if you know a subject, communicate well, and demonstrate your qualifications. You’ve got a shot at money if you can do everything.
You may have to produce qualifications for online tutoring work. Tutor brokers offer a range of subjects to prospective customers, offer them different learning options, for instance, individual lessons or group lessons, and hook students up with a credentialed teacher.
After you pass that hurdle, your next task is effectively tutoring a student. Usually, the results are in the enhanced knowledge of the student, tests passed, or skills acquired. You can see how the money could be good, especially when you’re tutoring the children of high-income individuals.
How Do I Become a Tutor?
It’s comparatively easy to be a tutor because it doesn’t have any requirements, although a knowledge of a subject and the ability to train a mind would be helpful. A prospective tutor can apply to tutor for a tutor broker, or they can put out a shingle on Craigslist and start selling their talents.
Subjects are assigned to academic disciplines, which often determine qualifications for tutors.
A general way to tackle the tutoring profession is to get some hands-on tutor training to complement your knowledge of a subject. Tutor training won’t increase your insight into mathematics, but tutors’ techniques could help you better teach a mathematical subject.
The easier the subject, the less certification a tutor needs, and many tutors of children get by with a high school diploma. A college undergraduate degree is often required when subjects become more complicated, and the students are older. Either way, choosing a subject you can excel in is good.
Flexibility
One advantage tutors have over other educational options is the ability to offer both structured or unstructured learning experiences. Depending on the student’s needs, tutors provide the kind of structure that students need: Skill training, support for the student’s efforts, and safety from more open structured learning environments, all to prepare them better for unstructured environments like the workplace.
They also offer unstructured training, where students go at their own pace in the educational process, taking on a subject when they want to, learning the topic on their terms, and how they want to be instructed. A good tutor can offer their lessons in either learning mode: structured or unstructured systems.
Unstructured learning encourages students to grow circumstantially by interacting with the subject. In contrast, structured learning is designed learning where the student grasps and earns grades reflecting their mastery of a subject. Because these two areas require a tutor, tutors can teach in either mode.
What Kind of Tutors Make the Most Money?
Science-technology-engineering-mathetmatics, or STEM, is where the most significant demand for tutors exists, and that area pays the most money. There’s such a substantial shortage of STEM-trained people entering the economy that the shortage creates a lop-sided supply-and-demand picture.
Eighty percent of the jobs in the economy go to people with STEM backgrounds, so students are looking for STEM educators to prepare them for careers in Science, Technology, engineering, or mathematics.
STEM people exhibit the most significant critical thinking skills of the products of colleges today. They have better necessary thinking skills than graduates in the humanities and much better than graduates of business departments.
Decide on a Subject Niche
A subject niche might be understood best as a discipline, at least for this discussion, because the world assigns subjects to disciplines. As a tutor, you could offer your teaching skills to more subjects if your subject niche could be discussed as your discipline.
If you have a degree in Physics, that is, physics is your discipline, then subjects you could tutor in would include statistical mechanics, classical mechanics, thermodynamics, electronics, electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics. Moreover, you could tutor in mathematics, trigonometry, and calculus because these subjects are required for an undergraduate program in Physics.
In tutoring children, understanding how children fall behind their peer group can help you know what services you can offer to children who need to catch up. While your knowledge reference for children isn’t as intense as the Physics discipline discussed above, it requires mastery of the knowledge so you can confidently get children up to speed with their studies.
Brush Up on Knowledge
If you haven’t looked at your subject for a while, catching up should take no time. This will not only cause you to recall your studies from earlier but also make you aware of changes in the discipline or subject that you aren’t aware of.
To brush up:
- Start by connecting with people who know the subject.
- Take an online course, sign up for classes, or even an advanced degree at your university. If you work in teaching, contact professional associations and find people to connect with.
- Start using your social media accounts.
Join a book club and focus on your specialty, especially when you look for group discussions at the book club. Also, start collecting exciting books in your discipline on a bookshelf or an e-reader.
Find a Specialty Subject
Within every discipline, there’s a particular subject you’re drawn to. An easy example would be World History. You may not have been able to stop reading books on Napolean, and you may have taken so many courses on a favorite subject that you have a minor in the discipline without intentionally going after one.
That, my friend, would amount to a special. You are not only very knowledgeable in an area, you love the subject. Your enthusiasm might be infectious, and your students may share your love of the subject because you communicated well.
An efficient consideration is what specialty will make the most money. The further up the academic ladder you go, the more you must demonstrate a grasp of your subject, even show you have something to offer in the discipline, but that’s at the Ph.D. level. Study a STEM subject (as discussed above) and discover topics you can teach. Try mathematics, for instance, and see if you can’t find work tutoring math.
Open a Business Checking Account
Tutoring is not a business you can just start, then put your feet on the desk and watch the cash flow in. It’s a hands-on business. Open a business checking account once you’ve created a free-lance tutor business. This will make it easier for your accountant and tax advisor to help you.
A business checking account is a fundamental enabler, allowing you to accept credit cards as payment for your services. Your personal bank account cannot accept credit card payments at all. Your records will also be apparent because none are garbled with personal purchases or budget items you don’t want to consider, let alone muddling up your business records.
The only drawback of a business bank account is the opening balance and the maintaining balance numbers. Ask your bank how much money you need to open one and how much of a balance you must run before you open one. This isn’t necessarily a disqualifying issue, but it’s still good to know so you’re not surprised when they tell you so.
Determine Locations to Tutor Students
Tutoring students can be mobile. You can teach almost anywhere you and your students are comfortable. While I wouldn’t recommend a local cafe or an indoor mall, others have had positive experiences in commercial establishments.
Tutors put a premium on quiet spaces, offering as few interruptions as possible. Most libraries will allow you to save a study room sound-sealed. Schools often have tutor spaces; ask school officials.
Churches and community centers often have classrooms available, and they would be open to letting you tutor a student there. Sometimes, parents welcome a tutor into the home to help their child with their studies. While this can be where the student is most comfortable, it violates the rule that most tutors have to tutor only in public spaces.
If you’re doing online tutoring, you may have the best situation. You don’t meet anybody physically but in a virtual space, making your tutoring experience happen wherever you want.
Market Your Business
One area you should focus on gaining clients is the Internet. Develop a website dedicated to your business. Get comfortable with calendar scheduling software. While you may not want to present a dry, atypical resume to prospects, that’s always available, you could produce a brochure with all your resume’s strong points.
As part of your pitch, figure out what you offer that’s of particular value, say “Pavlovian compassion for children.” Or, “patient and caring.”
Write blogs about your tutoring experiences on your website. Also, maximize your social media contacts, display positive referrals on the site, and cultivate connections in all the schools in your area, promoting your services that way. Or create an online demo of a tutoring session.
Online Tutoring
Despite all the advantages of technology, online tutoring is a sticky wicket requiring special training to ensure you can successfully tutor someone remotely. The technology does put a certain distance between student and tutor and may subtract some from the experience. No worry! You can take online courses to develop particular skills to become an effective tutor.
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