Back in January 2025, I began my TEFL course in Barcelona, Spain. Over the course of an intensive month, I gained hands-on experience teaching in schools and private classrooms, working with students ranging in age from 5 to 80. By the end, I’d earned my 190-hour Level 5 certificate and was fully qualified to start my teaching career.

Finding My Niche

I started small, teaching English to Spanish friends in Barcelona. This early experience did wonders for my confidence and helped me build out my skillset. One of these friends needed English for a job opportunity, which pushed me into the niche of business English.

To develop personalised lessons for his needs, I drew on free online resources like the Market Leader and Business Result workbooks (both easy to find as PDFs), focusing especially on sales language and pitching. This friend became my first loyal student, and the six-month deadline he set for himself kept me motivated to deliver real results.

Moving to Online Tutoring Platforms

With this experience under my belt, I applied to online tutoring platforms like Preply and iTalki, using business English as my selling point while still teaching general English to students who wanted it. Students came from all over the world, and as I built up reviews, my profile gained more visibility – creating a kind of snowball effect toward steady bookings.

Don’t Undervalue Yourself Early On

If there’s one piece of advice I’d give anyone starting out, it’s this: don’t work for less than you’re worth.

Platforms like Preply already take a significant cut when you’re starting (commission begins at 33%). So if you’re charging their recommended $10/hour, you’re really only earning around $7/hour. Depending on where you live, that might be workable. But after moving back to the UK, that translated to roughly £5/hour — a fraction of the UK’s minimum wage of just under £13/hour.

Your progress may feel slower than other tutors’ at first, but I’d strongly recommend setting your prices at a rate you’re actually comfortable with from day one, rather than underselling yourself to rack up reviews. If you don’t make this change early, you risk resenting your first students – their rate stays locked in at whatever you originally charged (say, $10), even as your listed price rises, unless you renegotiate. And renegotiating comes with its own risk: losing students who can’t afford the new rate.

Going Independent

Once you’ve built a solid client base and developed real relationships with your students, it’s worth considering a shift to private tutoring outside these platforms. Technically, this isn’t allowed under sites like Preply’s terms – but in practice, as long as you have a way of contacting your students directly, you won’t run into trouble for going independent.

Making this move myself was the best decision I made for my financial success. It let me escape the high commission rates and build a client base made up entirely of loyal, direct students.

Building Toward Freedom

From there, the path is about growth – branching into new markets and niches until you’re earning enough to work as a full-time, self-employed tutor, on your own terms, at your own rates, and on your own schedule.

This kind of freedom is something more people are chasing every day, as digital nomad living and remote work become increasingly suited to modern life. If that’s the kind of freedom you’ve been looking for, it all starts with a TEFL course.