By Leoni Taylor 
⏱ Monday 19th December 2022

One of the common misconceptions about being a tutor is that you will only be hired, and that tutoring experience is only valuable, if you want to be a teacher in the future. It’s a misconception because, whilst your tutoring experience will definitely be useful for a role within education, you will also have a much wider set of skills, relevant to all sorts of different career fields. 

Have you ever thought about the range of skills you gain from tutoring? Think about how you plan your lessons catering to individual pupil’s needs and the creativity that you use to do this, the excellent interpersonal skills and empathy you have, how you have to think on your feet to respond to unexpected questions and situations. All these skills are of course extremely useful when working in education, but they are also relevant in so many other sectors too.

A common interview question is ‘why are you suitable for this role?’ and a useful way to answer this is to draw upon your own experience. A marketing role? You have demonstrated creativity in your tutoring. Travel agent? You’re an excellent people person due to working so closely with pupils, teachers, and the wider Tutor Trust team. Care assistant? You have resilience, empathy, and the ability to interact successfully with people from diverse backgrounds. Mathematician, Scientist, Journalist? You have shown excellent subject knowledge in your chosen area of tutoring just by having the ability to teach it at all!

As a highly trained tutor at Tutor Trust, you can also get involved with our additional opportunities such as the Advanced Tutor Pathway and Brand Ambassadors where you can expand on your tutor skill set even further. Whilst at University, I was a tutor and Outreach Team member, and once I graduated and began applying for jobs, I realised the large skill set I had equipped myself with. I gained marketing and recruitment skills from being a Brand Ambassador, excellent interpersonal skills from tutoring, improved my planning and organisational skills, and more than anything, had increased my confidence. All these skills assisted me in achieving my place in the role of Recruitment and Impact Administrator here at Tutor Trust.

Many of our alumni also hold testament to how being a tutor can make you employable in varying fields of work. Demi-Lee McIntyre-Yates worked as a Secondary English Tutor and is now a Student Recruitment Coordinator at KPMG:

“As a Student Recruitment Coordinator, I regularly interact with a range of different people. My time at Tutor Trust helped to prepare me for this as it was important that I was able to adapt my communication style to meet the needs of my pupils. Being able to adapt this meant I could get the best out of the young people I tutored, and this skill has also been really beneficial in my current role as I make sure that applicants and offer holders are well informed and can make the best decisions for themselves.”

Callum Hibbs also shared how skills learnt as a Secondary English Tutor helped him pursue his law career:

“As a Tutor with Tutor Trust I developed skills such as communication, empathy and time management, which helped me greatly when pursuing a career in family law.”

And of course, tutoring has also helped some of our alumni kick start their teaching career, such as Maddison McCracken who tutored Secondary Science whilst she was at university:

“Tutor Trust is the reason I am studying to become a teacher. The most important skill I learned during my time as a tutor is the personalisation of tasks. Developing my creativity by making unique tasks based on the ability and interest of my tutees. I put this into practice nearly every day in the classroom. In addition, my role gave me a real appreciation for CPD.”

So don’t sell yourself short as a tutor, the experience and skills that you will gain are absolutely valuable, no matter what it is you want to do in your future! 

If you're interested in joining us as a tutor, then you can find out more and apply here.

For any questions, please get in touch: [email protected]. 

Date of publication: 09/08/2021