Why look for a teaching job when you can start your own academy?

Ever since she was a little girl, Anita wanted to be a physics teacher at the best school in her city. Years of hard work and two degrees later, she is where she wanted to be. She teaches around 150 students and earns a pretty decent paycheque. 

On the other hand, Priya, Anita’s colleague at the school, wanted to start her own online academy to teach English. She initially started teaching as a side gig (along with her full-time job), to a handful of students through Learnyst. 

Three months later, she resigned her full-time job at the school, started her own academy with over 200 students from all over the county, and is earing in multiples of what her full-time job at the school was paying her. 

This post talks about the A-Z of starting your own training academy and how to succeed in your venture like Priya. We will look into the other side of things as well – getting a teaching job and its pros and cons.

How to find a teaching job?

As with any other job, there are certain steps you must take to become a teacher. And they are not easy, and the whole process will take years to complete. Here is the standard route adopted by anyone who wishes to be a teacher –

1. Deciding your subject of specialty  
2. Getting a (or multiple) college degree(s)
3. Taking a teacher certification test 

Once you’ve completed the above process, the next step is to find yourself a job; which anyone with experience will tell you is no easy task. You can use platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, Naukri, Monster, etc. or even the traditional newspaper medium to search for vacancies.

But here’s the big question – Is it worth it? Assume that you do manage to find a job, the salary perks are not very impressive. As per PayScale, the average entry-level high school teacher makes just around INR 2.45 LPA, and for experienced teachers, it is just around the INR 4.7 LPA. Someone running an online academy on the flip side can easily earn much more than that.

What are the pros and cons of being a full-time teacher?

Pros

• Job satisfaction 
• Long summer vacations and holidays 
• Constant skill development 
• Personal bonding with students 

Cons

• Low monetary compensation (Salary)
• The workload can be overwhelming 
• Lack of support from administration 
• Continuous skill development requirements 

How to start your own academy?

The following steps should be taken to set up and sell your first online course – 

1. Know the audience

First and foremost, you need to narrow down on your target audience. The ideal thing to do would be to hire a market researcher, but you can also do this yourself by talking to people or running polls on social media. The ultimate goal is to land a specific target audience for your academy. Then you need to find out how scalable this target audience is to estimate profitability. You’ll also need to know where these people might be from – will they purely be from your local market or will you have international students as well? 

2. Choose the right tech and tool 

You will also need the right Learning Malmanagement System and supporting tools to deliver your courses – the eLearning business is 50% content and 50% delivery. Delivery is entirely dependent on speed, user experience, intuitiveness, and other features. The tools you choose should be robust and able to scale up with the growth of your business. The platform you choose should be secure enough that your content doesn’t get stolen under any circumstances.

3. Content 

The most important piece of the game is the content, and it has to make your course stand out from what your competitors are offering. If possible, go for professional-looking content with decent production value. Avoid content with sloppy writings and boring PowerPoints. Either take as much time as required to do it yourself or hire professional writers and designers to do it for you. 

4. Find the right partners 

It is exhausting and not viable for you to try to do everything on your own. You should stay true to your strengths and weaknesses and only focus on tasks where your strengths lie at and outsource the rest to carefully chosen partners.

5. Market it 

After you’re done building your course, the next part is to start marketing it so that enough people enroll. Your marketing strategy is totally dependent on your target audience. For example, if your target audience is people looking for copywriting courses, you can run Google Ads for related keywords.

6. Treat it like a business

Because that is what it is. Firstly, you need to learn the economics of the business and learn about revenue, taxes, and pricing. Far too many entrepreneurs have suffered because they didn’t take the time out to understand terms like sunk cost, opportunity cost, and price curves. 

What are the pros and cons of starting your own academy?

Pros

• If you get everything right, you can expect a huge return on investment in your online academy. Once people start liking your courses, they could even refer people to take your courses up – resulting in more income for you. What you could earn from a regular teaching job will be overshadowed by your earnings from an online academy in a short span.
• You don’t have to work for 8 hours straight when you’re running an online academy. Live tutoring sessions can be spread out in such a way that it is convenient for you and your students as well.
• Depending on how good your courses are and how well they are marketed, you will have students signing up from countries that are on a different time-zone than yours. One of the best advantages of your academy being online is that you can teach them without even leaving your room. You can even have a single time slot for students from countries that are geographically closer to each other.    
• Students can leave immediate feedback once they complete each chapter. This allows you to easily incorporate changes to your course materials and style of teaching. 
• Teachers are no longer limited to a board and a projector when teaching online. There are tools for online teaching that can make the whole process interactive and fun for your students.

Cons

• A lot of time and effort has to be spent to develop just one online course.
• Teaching online can make you feel isolated.
• Your students may not have the same kind of technology at their disposal. This might inhibit you from delivering some portions of your course.

How Learnyst can help in setting up your own academy?

As a pioneer in enabling online educators to set up their courses online, Learnyst can help you with the following – 

• Build a custom website that will look good on mobile and on a computer screen. All websites built on Learnyst are also SEO optimized so that your course ranks well on Google. 
• Learnyst helps you to create a personalized mobile app based on your brand guidelines so that your students can learn at their convenience.
• Learnyst also allows you to publish your course just once and safely embed it on multiple websites like blogs and affiliates. 
• Integration with third-party tools is easy. For example, you can easily integrate with Mailchimp to run email marketing campaigns.

Related post The 4 Hottest ELearning Standards For Your E-Learning Business In 2020

So, what are the next steps? 

At Learnyst, we help you with the entire process of course creation to marketing, creating your own branded online academy.

If you already have course content ready, signup with us and get your online academy free for 14 days.

You can create your own branded online academy, upload, sell, and get 100% course sales credited to your bank account during this 14 day trial period.

So, go ahead. Create and Sell Courses online and make 10X revenue within months.