Korean Job Discussion Forums

[salmonSE]

Hi Everyone,

I teach online via Skype and am trying to break into the Korean teaching market. I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on good ways to find potential students interested in online lessons. Thanks for any advice!

BTW - I don't live in Korea, I'm U.S. based.

[PRagic]

You could fly over here and pepper apartment complexes and high traffic density areas with fliers. Spend a month or two here so that you can meet the first batch of students (and parents) personally. Have your credentials and experience translated into Korean. If you don't have a related degree, preferably in education and an MA, forget it.

IF you manage to reel in some students, word of mouth might work from there.

[FMPJ]

Good luck with that. The market here is extraordinarily competitive, esp. for an outsider with no experience on the ground to get organic word-of-mouth going.

[Stain]

PRagic is right. You need some initial connection and work your way from there. Word of mouth is strong in this country.

[DaeguNL]

[talentedcrayon]

OP - PM me.

Some stories:

My friend hires Filipinos to teach online. He pays them about $2/hour. They are used mostly just for conversation. He's pretty successful doing what he's doing.

I worked for another guy who managed to do it very successfully from a financial standpoint. Yet, it was all a bunch of crap from the educational point of view. He was paying me about $30/hour back in Canada.

He had no real curriculum and his success depended entirely on his reputation as a Korean who made it in New York City, New York. He wrote a Naver Blog about how awesome he was, Koreans bought into it and hung on his words. Thus, when he started selling his English classes and advice on how to succeed in America he had hundreds of people ready to sign up.

He wanted me to lie about my background (even though I actually had a good job... but I wasn't quite a partner at an accounting firm yet). It was all smoke and mirrors. But, I refused to lie to people about my job (I see no reason to be ashamed of myself).

His other teacher went from freelance business article writer who traded stocks in his free time to being a portfolio manager and analyst at some made up company. This way the owner could justify the $2000 people were paying him.

However, he promptly lost most of his students. Despite my best efforts... students realized that he really didn't know anything about teaching. He would interrupt my classes while he was drunk and berate students over nothing. I even had one student who contacted me by email to complain. Apparently the guy had told him he was a complete loser because he worked as a Software Engineer for Blizzard (Starcraft and WOW) and wasn't a super successful accountant... I couldn't believe it... But, then I figured out why. The student was moving to LA and was going to quit the class. The owner wanted the poor student to think that he couldn't make it without him... So, he told him he was going to fail in America to get the student to keep paying.

The best part of the story? A German guy paid me by handing me a newspaper on a park bench. The cash was in an envelope inside. The guy was super paranoid. He wouldn't meet me anywhere that a CCTV camera might be. (He was a good guy though... but obviously the 007 style spy rendevous were a bit over the top for me...) Oh.. and the German guy got the money from a specific ATM in a Korean market that accepted a nameless bankcard...

So, OP... its doable. But, the world of online teaching is fraught with danger, double agents and dirty hands.