How I made it (kind of)

“You become a TEFL teacher when your life has gone wrong.” Alain de Botton, Philosopher.

There is an infamous article in The Daily Telegraph called The Slavery of Teaching English which should not be read by anybody considering a career in teaching English as a second language. If I had read it before I embarked on my journey then I would have probably settled for an easier life in my home city.

I didn’t. And here I am a few years later — not particularly as chastened or as soulless as the author of The Telegraph article had predicted.

I can put this down to a few incidents that changed my attitude to teaching English as a career and pushed me to be less of an observer and more of an actor.

When I first arrived in London, I was looking for a job to pay my rent and for beer money so I found work at a mediocre language ‘school’ in Wimbledon. The hourly wage was terrible and the staff turnover was huge but I enjoyed the lessons and it was not difficult work. However, the owner had a relaxed attitude to paying teacher salaries so I regrettably had to part ways with this outfit.

I then found work at a language training company. These organisations send you out to work at businesses teaching employees. The wages are a little better but the travel time cuts into your work, particularly in a sprawling city like London. One day, one of the admin staff accidentally sent me an invoice for a student I had been teaching. The difference between the amount of money I had been paid for the assignment and the amount charged to the student was astronomical so I parted ways with this agency as soon as practicable to try and work for myself.

When you are first starting a business, you don’t know anything. You can take different pieces of advice but you have so much information that you don’t know what is worth listening to and what should be discarded.

There was one piece of advice which I took seriously though. It came at a networking event from a business consultant who I had talked to a few times previously and who seemed to know her stuff. She told me to specialise more and as I had a law degree I started Legal English UK.

Another thing you don’t have when you are first starting out is money and you are having to compete with massive organisations with big marketing budgets so you have to work harder than you would ever have imagined.

Over time, we attracted a surprising range of clients. Santander, Diageo, Google, Cisco and numerous law firms have hired us to teach their lawyers. It is a great feeling that you get their business and your competitors don’t.

Big companies don’t usually know how to work social media so my best piece of advice to you is to work your social media accounts hard. Don’t just post links on Twitter but actively comment — find people of influence in your niche and make them aware of you by commenting with value. When you do post links, give the tweet a little personality. Be loud and unafraid to tell people you are here. You can’t compete with businesses spending thousands of pounds on Google ads but you can compete by putting your personality into your social media accounts.

My final piece of advice is that you have to work harder than you could imagine and even though you might not be getting any results, you have to keep doing it. Keep writing content and posting on social media — keep improving your Google ranking and making sure that every potential customer knows you are out there. You just need to be in the room where it happens.

I have also written The Legal English Grammar Guide, do buy it.

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