Top Ways for Non-Native English Teachers To Build Their Teaching Career

There are a number of ways Native and non native English speakers can build their careers. This blog will cover some examples.

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This blog post is going to discuss some of the ways in which you can build your teaching career as a non-native English speaker. This is really important to discuss because many people who take a TESOL course are not aware of how to implement this experience after the course. Here I will share my personal experience and give some advice on how to build your own teaching career. To give some quick background information, I have been teaching online since 2020 because of the quarantine situation and I am also a non-native English speaker.

I have been studying English for 20 years. Here I discuss some challenges that online ESL teachers face when they build their teaching career and not only online ESL teachers but just teachers in general, especially those who are non-native English speakers.

The first problem many people face is a lack teaching experience or any general education in the teaching sphere. If you don't have this English teaching expertise then a TESOL certification would be the first step, as it provides you with the basic methodology and understanding of how to teach English to those who don't speak English as a first language.

I had already had some teaching experience as a as a private tutor, before I took a TEFL course. I understood that it would be a great addition to my CV to take some more specialized courses so I also obtained an IELTS score. So if you want to build a strong career, I suggest it is a good idea to take some additional training as well, while you are getting professional experience.

The next idea on how to build on your teaching skills would be to get as much teaching practice as possible. Right after university, I applied for various jobs in China and I got an International job that was really a life-changing experience. I made a lot of friends from all over the world and I also learned how to teach from different experienced teachers. That part of my experience was probably the most helpful. I would also recommend you consider volunteer teaching, if you want to find some practice, but you are still unsure that you want to commit full time to teaching.

Some more ideas

These ideas are a little bit different from teaching itself, but they are still really valuable and helpful in your career.

Blogging, lesson planning or creating your own teaching materials are all good ways of increasing your experience. Consider teaching through a blog, it's also a great idea to get some professional experience and design your online lessons. Many people run their micro blogs on instagram and they share either their teaching experience or English learning experience with the audience. They also give useful advice and they create interactive lessons and so on. There are some teachers who don't teach at all, they just design lesson plans and create materials and sell them online teachers making money this way.

Other opportunities

One more thing to recommend is check out handbooks for teachers, so for example there is an IELTS handbook for teachers this handbook contains a lot of useful information on how to organize your lessons and on how to approach to different tasks. I strongly recommend you search for these types handbooks or teachers books.

If you teach general English uh you will probably still focus on some specific skills and you may use a course book specifically for this purpose. Usually these have ‘teachers books’ and this resource is extremely useful to use it in your preparation and teaching, as it has a lot of useful advice on how to organize whatever lessons you need to teach.

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