As with any subject, becoming a tutor in accounting isn’t something you can start doing until you have the necessary qualifications.
However, unlike becoming a teacher or university lecturer, the barriers to entry are few so if you do have a few qualifications under your belt you should be able to start working as a tutor with minimal effort.
Experience, of course, counts for a lot, too, but in the beginning, a lot of tutors won’t have a lot of firsthand experience teaching so you can get by without having had years of practice.
Believe it or not, being able to market yourself is one of the most useful skills in becoming an accounting tutor. You might well be the best at teaching accounting in your local area, but if you can’t convince students to take your classes, then it isn’t worth much.
Working with an accounting tutor is one way to get to know your worth, and how to best market yourself and teach your classes. With Superprof, you can find an accounting tutor online or in-person to hone your skills.
As such, you’ll need to develop a specific set of skills in order to make it as an accounting tutor, so that you can build a roster of loyal students, know how best to price and organize courses if you decide to make some.
Searching for a good accounting teacher? look here on Superprof.
How to find students as an accounting teacher?
If you’re going to teach in person or even establish an online presence and teach through video calls or courses you create, you’re going to need to find students.
After all, whatever you decide to do as an accounting tutor, you’re running a business.
This is one of the biggest mistakes a lot of people make whenever they make the decision to become a tutor or work for themselves. They think that if they’re good enough at what it is they do, the students will flock to them like sheep to a shepherd, but unfortunately, it rarely works that way.
To find students so that you can make a living as a tutor, you need to put in a lot of effort to market yourself.
While you may not be at all interested in marketing or branding, these are terms you’ll need to be familiar with if you are to succeed financially as a tutor and rise to the top.
Once you’ve gotten to terms with the fact that students aren’t just going to appear out of nowhere, you’ll want to start taking action since it can take time for your marketing efforts to yield results.
To get you started and heading in the right direction, here are some things you can do to boost your initial efforts and land some students for your classes or courses:
Post Ads
Your best bet for bringing in new students, in the beginning, is to post ads for free on classified ad websites.
Craigslist is perhaps the most prominent example that will come to mind, but there are many such websites that can help you land students in your local area or further afield.
To maximise your chances of success, you should spend some time composing a message which will entice prospective students to take your classes or courses over those of the competition.
Describe what it is you offer, how students can get in touch if they are interested, and how much your classes are per hour.
Social Media
Social media is another potential avenue for drumming up business and getting students on board for your classes or courses.
While it isn’t the easiest route to take, since you need to know how to create and maintain a social media presence in order to be successful, it can get your results fast.
To make it on social media, all you need to do is create a business account and put out value as often as you can. Once you start to have some followers, you can then throw out the occasional plugin in which you direct potential students towards your course or classes.
Providing value is the key, though, since if you don’t offer students something before they take a class with you, how will they know if you’re the best choice?
Blogging
Blogging is one way to provide value to would-be students.
If you can start to build a blog in which you establish yourself as a voice in the world of accounting, then you’ll almost certainly start to get people contacting you and wanting to hire your services over time.
Your first post can be as simple as creating a blog addressing a common question people have about accounting. From there, you can start to use material that comes up in your classes to write about in your blog.
Who knows, one day you might even build your blog up to the point at which you can get income from ads through affiliates.
YouTube or video sharing platforms can be good alternatives to the blog if you prefer to communicate orally. You can create videos addressing common topics in accounting with the goal of building an audience that will then want to pay for your classes or courses.
Superprof is another option if you’re interested in becoming an accounting tutor but you don’t have much marketing nouse or desire to market yourself.
Once you register as a tutor, students will be able to find your classes online and sign up easily so you can sit back and focus on creating the best lesson plans.
How do I price my accounting course?
If you create an accounting course, one of the most difficult decisions you’ll have to make is how much you charge your students to take it.
We live in a world where more and more people are starting to take online courses as a substitute for degrees and school educations, whether for better or worse.
As such, it’s not uncommon to see online courses in the region of £1,000+.
That might sound crazy, but if you can offer a lot of value with your course, then people will pay the price.
Of course, we don’t recommend that you start out with such a high price, as this will put off 99% of people. If you’re just starting out, you need to factor in several things when pricing your course:
Competition
First, what else is out there?
If your course is on a particular topic within accounting, how many others are there out there and how much do they cost to enrol in?
If your course is a general overview of the field, for example, it’s worth knowing that the Diploma of Accounting from Inspire Education costs a whopping £2,000-4,000.
But before you go setting your price according to the competition, you’ll also need to know what exactly you bring to the table that your competitors don’t.
Value
Value is subjective, of course, but you need to know what you are offering that competitors don’t or can’t. If you aren’t bringing anything new, then why should students pay as much money for your course as they would for that of your competitors?
Value doesn’t necessarily mean you know something about accounting that other tutors don’t, because the whole field has been covered extensively already.
Instead, it can refer to your specific background or firsthand experience with the subject that other people might not have had. It could be the unique and engaging way you teach the material, or how you integrate cutting-edge research into your content that sets you apart.
What are the advantages of becoming an accounting tutor?
The role of the tutor is often misunderstood, and conflated with that of the school teacher.
While the tutor’s job is to educate just as the teachers is, there are several key differences in how they go about this.
For a start, the tutor runs his or her own business, whereas the teacher is responsible for the school or educational institution they work for. Secondly, tutors are responsible for everything that happens in classes, not bound to any curriculum, which can have its pros and cons.
As such, tutors can have it good in that they keep all the earnings from lessons or courses they’ve created. This means they can have a higher earnings ceiling and manage their own workload. They also have the flexibility to take time off when they want, plan the classes they want to teach, and more.
How to organize your first accounting course?
To organize your first accounting course, you’ll want to first think of a topic you want to cover.
Are you going to do a brief introduction to the field of accounting or hone in on one particular subject?
Once you’ve established that, you’ll need to break the course down into logical and easy-to-follow sections.
Nobody likes to consume content that’s thrown at them in an incoherent way.
You want your students to feel as if they are progressing at a good pace, and working their way through the topics in a logical manner.
It’s also a good idea to gather useful resources you can point your students to for further study since it’s impossible to cover everything in one course. This is another reason to create a blog or YouTube channel since you can direct students to videos or posts you’ve made for more information on a specific aspect of the course.
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