How to Become an IB Tutor

As an international qualification taken by students from all over the world, totalling over 170,000 students each year, there is always incredible demand for IB tutors. No matter if you’re someone that studies Mathematics at university and wants to tutor Maths and Physics, or if you’re an English student that wants to focus on improving your students' English IB HL grades, there is always a demand for new tutors.

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But, not everyone has the skills needed to become an IB tutor, with only the brightest and most gifted students being able to teach others how to get into those top grade boundaries. In this article, we’ll be going over the skills you need to become an IB tutor, signalling exactly how you can get into this useful and in-demand profession.

What Do I Need to Become an IB Tutor?

If you’re looking to become a successful IB tutor, then there are a few core elements, both including academic background and professional skills, that you should be able to exhibit.

Before starting the process of becoming an IB tutor, you should make sure that you have:

• A strong academic background
• Planning and organisational skills
• An interest in teaching

Let’s break these down further.

Have a look at our comprehensive set of IB Study Notes and IB Practice Questions, developed by expert IB teachers and examiners!

A Strong Academic Background

The vast majority of students that are looking for an online will fall into two distinct camps: those looking to push for a 7, and those looking to up their grade from a 2 or 3 up to a passing 4.

If you’re someone that only scored a 4 or a 5 in an IB subject, then while you could indeed tutor students in that second camp up to a passing grade, you might not be the best candidate for the job. On the contrary, the tutors that will do best in the world of online tutoring are those that have performed extremely well in the IB subjects that they want to teach.

Most likely, if you’re teaching a subject, you will have scored a 7 in your own IB exams in that subject, with a 6 being the lowest ‘acceptable’ grade that you could have to then begin to teach that subject. Equally, you need to make sure that you’ve obtained these grades in HL exams, not just SL.

Going beyond this, the typical rule is that if you want to tutor a subject, you should have at least one academic level above what you’re teaching. That means if you want to teach a student Maths SL, you should have sat Maths HL and done very well. Equally, if you want to teach Maths HL, then you should really be studying a subject at university that uses those skills on a daily basis.

Without a stable academic background, it may be fairly difficult for you to become a successful online IB tutor.

Planning and Organisational Skills

Two fundamental abilities you need to have when attempting to become an IB tutor are fantastic planning and organisational skills. Often, tutors will be working with anywhere between 5-40 students, depending on how many hours they’re aiming to work in any given week. Due to this, you need to be able to juggle up to 40 different student revision plans, knowing what each student is working on and what you need to focus on with them when they turn up in your lesson space.

If you’re not organised, you won’t know what you need to work on with students, often leading to an awkward moment in your lessons. You should be able to plan your lessons out ahead of time, ensuring that each of your students covers relevant material that will push them onwards to their intended goal.

Without these skills, you’ll find it difficult to scale up your tutoring business.

An Interest in Teaching

While you may be the smartest student in your year, having gained top marks in your own IB exams, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re cut out to be an IB tutor. Just because you, yourself, are great at a subject, doesn’t always translate into you being able to teach that subject well.

Due to this, the very best IB tutors will also be students that have either an interest or talent in teaching, with charisma and friendliness often being the leading attributes of the top tutors in any tutoring platform. Without the ability to break down difficult concepts into an easy-to-understand format that your students can relate to, you’ll find tutoring very difficult.

Equally, especially when you move up to tutoring many students, often for hours in a row, you need to build up a level of stamina when it comes to being friendly and charismatic. You must bring a high level of energy to all of your lessons, meaning that if you don’t see yourself as a person that would be able to talk for hours on end with unfaltering energy, then this may not be for you.

Fit the Bill?

If you think you’re on the right track in each one of these above categories, then you might be the perfect fit to become an online IB tutor. By working with a leading platform like TutorChase, you’re able to get new leads that come directly to you, making finding new clients a breeze.

When wanting to start out in the world of online tutoring, it’s always a good idea to work through a tutoring network, as they will bring you new leads while also allowing you to focus your energy on tutoring itself, rather than marketing.

Get in touch with TutorChase today to put in an application to become an IB tutor in your favourite subjects. If you have a strong academic background, create organisational and planning skills, as well as a knack for teaching, then you’ll definitely be on the right track.

After an interview process, you could be TutorChase’s next top IB tutor. See you on the platform!