this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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I taught in person in China at first, and then after I started traveling full-time I taught online because all you need is a smartphone.
and no, the market is not at all saturated, it is wide open. there are literally thousands of jobs available right now across dozens of countries and online.
if you have any interest in traveling, or you need money, and are a native or fluent English speaker, teaching English is such a great deal.
I'm happy to answer any other questions you have.
thats great thanks for being so open to share your experience, how did you manage to get people driven to enroll to be your student? i get that online you would usually join a platform for it (there are many which is hard to know which to use, but they have many users so they do the work of marketing your service for you, but so comes with the competitiveness for students with other teachers)
for sure! I love talking about this stuff.
if you join an online platform with in-place curriculum, then they assign you to classes so the students are already there.
I didn't want a schedule, so i made myself available to casually chat with ESL learners on an app called palfish.
enough people called me up for me to make a few hundred a month, which is all I needed to travel. dorms are $100 a month in SE Asia, food is 1 to $4 a portion in all of asia, and I was backpacking half the time anyway.
when I landed in a country, I bought the unlimited data-only plan, clicked the "online" button, and then people called me up whenever they wanted to practice their english with me.
that online work was partially to offset using my savings, but i had already taught in person for ~7 years.
with each month of in-person teaching affording me ~3 months of living expenses, i had enough savings to travel for a couple decades by the time i started traveling full-time.
quick note: there's no competition for ESL students at the teacher level. there are way too many ESL students and not nearly enough English teachers to fulfill the demand. it's not even close.