Becoming a Tutor

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Samir Malik and I'm a private tutor here in the Austin area for middle school and high school students. Today, we're going to be discussing how to become a tutor. Now, becoming a tutor is a process which takes multiple steps. One, is of course having the appropriate credentials to being a tutor. If the target audience is middle school students then the tutor should have at least completed middle school and have a recommendation of about two to three years of high school. If the tutor is trying to target both middle school and high school students, the tutor should have completed high school as a minimum and preferable one or two years of college. And if the tutor is trying to cater to both middle, high school and college students, then the tutor should have completed at least a few years of college, preferably having a college degree. In my case, I have completed my undergraduate studies from Southern Methodist University and I work primarily with middle school and high school students. On occasion, I may take on the role of working with a college student as well. Now, once the tutor has completed his credentials, academic credentials, then he or she can begin the process of marketing his or her services because that is a key role in becoming a tutor. People in the community need to know about your services. They need to know that you are a tutor. And they need to be able to contact you so they can ask you about your services. They can ask you about your rates. They can also ask you about your availability. So, ways about going about marketing your services are contacting various schools, independent schools, speaking to counselors at those schools and letting them know about the services that you provide. Another way is advertising on craigslist in the lessons and tutorials section to let the community know that you are a tutor and a little bit about the services you provide. Creating an online website would be another way to publicize your services to the community. And last but not least would be word of mouth. Once you have started the process of working with one student or two students, then you build a relationship with the student from an academic perspective and you build that relationship from an academic perspective with the parents of that student. They begin to know you. You establish trust with the family. And once the family is happy with your services and they're happy once they have seen the results of their students, they will also let their friends know, or their family members know about the services you provide and they... those friends or other family members of theirs may contact you and question you about the services you provide as a tutor and may want you to work with their son or daughter as well. So there's multiple ways of marketing your services, but from my experience of being a tutor over the last three years here in Austin, I realized that word of mouth is one of the most successful ways to market your services as far as being a tutor and expanding your independent business as a tutor. So these are some points as far as how to become a tutor and then of course how do you... how to market your services as a tutor within the local community."