The most desirable job in the world, "iron rice bowl" is broken

"They said I didn't meet the requirements, so the bonus was canceled."

Martin was distressed, he told Silicon Star People. He's an American who lives in Florida but works as an English tutor on a Chinese online education platform, teaching English to Chinese kids remotely. He's been doing this job for nearly two years now, with students from as far away as China, starting with upper elementary school students and moving on to younger children, some as young as 3, with parents feeding their children at meal times.

After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, countries around the world issued strict homeownership orders that prevented most industries from operating normally. The U.S. unemployment rate soared to 14.7 percent in April, the highest since the Great Depression. At first Ma, the rain was grateful that his job hadn't been affected much, even as parents in China scrambled to send their children to the platform because of the outbreak, and he was a little busier than before.

But he soon found that while he was spending more time online, he was earning less.

Martin's platform had a number of monetary incentives, such as a $1 per lesson bonus for being on time for each lesson, and additional monetary rewards if you were online during busy hours or if you took reservations within 24 hours.

Now, however, these "perks" are either being toned down or eliminated.

Over the past few years, more and more people like Martin have joined different Chinese online education platforms to become English tutors. This job allows them to sit at home and teach English to Chinese children remotely, or teach a variety of classes in English. Not only does this job allow them to have free time, but it also provides a significant income.

Until 2020, almost everyone was happy with the job, often sharing on social media sites that it was the "best job in the world" and that they could even travel the world and make money at the same time.

But now, they are more often complaining about "whether salary cuts are the norm in this industry" and worrying whether the situation will get worse.

The "most desirable job in the world" has suddenly become less desirable.

Under the epidemic: students and teachers flock to the university

Early one morning in February 2020, Sabrina was surprised to find that a child's father had booked all the times she was already open on the platform at once. Unexpectedly, she had to reopen some times for other regular students, but to her surprise, these new openings were quickly booked up again.

She had to go the other way, sending private messages to her former students one by one to confirm whether they wanted to continue and when they wanted to attend classes, and then very carefully removing those times from the open calendar, leaving the slots open for former students so that new students would not "steal" them all. It's 1-2 days.

"It's a 1-2 day period, and suddenly a lot of new students come in," Sabrina told Silicon Star. Sabrina told Silicon Star. She has been working as an English teacher on an online education platform for almost two years and has become a high-star teacher on the platform because of her easy-going style and patient attitude. She also loves her job, "I love the Great Wall of China and Korean idols, and I hope to go to Asia one day."

Sabrina lives in Costa Rica and used to be an offline teacher. This online job allows her to not only cover her daily household expenses but even put her daughter through ballet and dance classes.

The arrival of new users brought some disruption, but for Sabrina, it was a good thing: "For a while, I was getting 1-2 new students a day, and some of them have since become my long-term students, choosing my classes every week."

Not only Sabrina, but many more foreign teachers have noticed a surge in student numbers and demand, all because of the outbreak of the New Crown epidemic.

Michael Shou, head of China for Cambly, an online English platform, told Silicon Star that the new influx of users is huge and follows the same path as the outbreak of the new epidemic. The new influx of users is very large and follows the same path as the outbreak of the new crown epidemic: "January-March is China, Japan, and Korea, then the Middle East, then South America.

According to Michael Shou, since the epidemic started suddenly, parents did not have time to slowly compare, so they tended to choose big platforms with a high reputation, and well-known products like VIPKid and Gogokids absorbed a lot of new users during the epidemic. According to public data released by VIPKid, from February to March, the number of new users exceeded 1 million for 2 consecutive months, and the frequency of classes for existing paying users also increased significantly, 144% more than in the past.

However, this high growth rate only lasted for 2 months in any region, and in some regions even less, and caused a lot of problems for teachers.

Sabrina soon found that the platform was becoming increasingly unstable, and there were times when she had to turn off her camera when communicating with students to ensure that her voice would go smoothly, or when she couldn't share screens and lessons with them. All of this was acceptable, but she soon found that there were more and more new teachers on the home page recommendations and the number of new students seeking her out was no longer as high as it had been at the beginning.

This was closely related to the outbreak that began to hit areas of the country in Europe and the United States. Many people were unable to work offline and therefore lost their source of livelihood and started to turn to online, and a job like teaching English online, which "work from home", "pays well" and "has flexible hours The "work from home", "good income" and "flexible time" job soon became the first choice for many people.

A large number of new teachers flooded into the platform.

The "iron rice bowl" is broken

Over the past few years, competition in the online English market has been intense, and startups represented by VIPKid have received huge amounts of funding. To get more foreign teachers from Europe and the US to come to the platform, these companies often use very aggressive pay mechanisms, and some star teachers have even posted their pay stubs on social networks, earning over $8,000 a month.

This income is very competitive even in the most developed area of the United States, New York. According to government surveys, the median household income in New York in 2019 will be around $71,000, with the average monthly income of a family being around $5,000.

But by 2020, becoming a new teacher will no longer be as easy as it was before.

Tim Gascoigne has been an online English tutor for more than 3 years and has quickly become an opinion leader in his community due to his flexible thinking. He has set up a personal website, Chanel on Youtube, to give guidance to new foreign teachers who want to enter the industry.

"It used to be that there was a demand for the platform," Tim recalls. Tim recalls. 19 years ago, most platforms had a Referral incentive, where every time you invited a new teacher onto the platform, you would receive a corresponding $100 monetary reward, as well as thousands of dollars in additional rewards if you successfully referred more than a certain number of teachers. "The highest a teacher can get is $250,000 a year through invitations."

But now it's people who are chasing the platform to become tutors. Whether it's a Google search, an agency specializing in tutors, or a public social media platform, it's clear that more people are becoming tutors, or are on their way to applying.

Not only that, but the platforms are also becoming more demanding in terms of requirements for foreign teachers. Almost all K12 tutoring platforms require applicants to have TEFL and TOEFL certificates, and some of the larger platforms require applicants to have a bachelor's degree and appropriate teaching experience from the past.

Of course, this is only the resume hurdle. After passing the resume, applicants are required to audition and show the platform their teaching ability and level. Different platforms have different styles that applicants need to familiarize themselves with and learn ahead of time; for example, some platforms like teachers demonstrate a very strong motivation.

"Have a high voice, be enthusiastic, remember to repeat those words more often, and then pronounce each vowel a little fuller." More and more of these "teaching posts" are appearing on the Internet to instruct people on how to become the kind of foreign teacher that Chinese parents will love.

But even if you do a lot of preparation, there's still a good chance you won't get through during the epidemic. "Who knows why you will or won't be accepted, but all you can do is wait. "

One applicant, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke of how she was originally a kindergarten teacher, and because of the epidemic, schools were closed and she was only able to get a minimum salary, which was no way to keep up with her family's basic expenses, so she began applying for online English tutoring jobs on multiple platforms on the advice of friends.

"I barely heard anything, one platform emailed me to tell me I was already on a Waiting list and was #354, and then there were others that would email me directly to tell me they had stopped applying altogether. "

Michael says they also received a very high number of applications during the outbreak, but they prioritized the original platform teachers over the new ones. "During the epidemic, teachers on our platform also lost their original full-time jobs, and they would spend more time teaching on the platform. Only when their time is also booked up will we let new teachers in."

And new crowns explode at different times in each country; in February and March, the most intense months, it's not the peak of individual teacher applications; the platform has long since begun admitting talent from its previous teacher pools, as well as working with foreign teacher agencies.

"In the past, we interviewed an average of 600 teachers a day; after the epidemic started, we interviewed 1,800 a day." An employee of one platform shared on social media.

In addition, the majority of Chinese companies were working from home during the epidemic to capture the market, slowing down their work efficiency, which indirectly led to a huge backlog of applications, sometimes taking a month or even longer than the original 1-2 weeks.

Tim has found that out of the 10 teachers he recommends, only about 1 is accepted, and they tend to take on teachers who have previous offline experience, "It's almost impossible for the average person to get a job as an online English teacher."

However, these organizations don't put this "guideline" in their job ads; they still let people apply and interview. Some platforms have teachers interviewing constantly, while others ask rejected applicants to wait 30 days and then apply again.

"The process is long and painful, and with the epidemic, many people don't stick around," Tim says. Indeed, if the app, icons don't have TEFL and TOEFL certificates, they must also put in more than 120 hours to obtain them before applying.

Even if they are accepted, the job is not as "easy" as you might think.

After several years of development, most platforms have developed their syllabus and teaching materials, and you follow the platform's requirements to the letter, so it often takes a lot of time initially to get familiar with and learn how to teach a course that the platform feels is "good".

What's more, you need to spend a lot of time maintaining relationships with students and parents behind the scenes to get positive feedback from users, which is a bonus.

"My classrooms have younger kids, probably 5-8 years old, and the parents are usually with the class, so you have to keep the energy high to keep them happy." Martin, says he finds emotional drain to be a more important burden than preparing classroom materials. "Especially after consecutive classes, it's hard to keep your energy high all the time."

Nor can users keep growing at a high rate. "After March, there was very little new big growth in China." Michael Shou says, "People who wanted to learn English online were coming in as much as they could.

So the competition among teachers on the platform started to get more intense, and Martin even felt that the platform was deliberately stirring up competition between old and new teachers.

"Users prefer experienced teachers or teachers who score high on the platform and are popular." So many new teachers have to get positive user reviews as quickly as possible to stand out as a way to gain more exposure and schedule classes. Some new teachers, for example, play games or praise their children more, etc. "They're not doing it so their students can learn better, just so they're happy and can give good reviews." Both Sabrina and Martin expressed similar sentiments, "Some teachers are just there to make money, they are not teaching their students."

Around April, even some experienced foreign teachers began complaining in the Facebook community, suspecting that the platform was backtracking to new teachers through algorithms and operations, especially part-time teachers who worked on multiple platforms and reported that their student numbers seemed to be dwindling.

And to make matters worse, bargaining power seems to be disappearing from their hands.

As more and more people start applying to become online tutors, the platforms have started to reshape the salary structure for tutors, with the average salary for a newly accepted teacher now ranging from $7.50-$8.50 per lesson, while the old base salary of $10-$15 per lesson has almost disappeared.

And the Refer bonus, which was so important, has been drastically reduced because, for most platforms, they no longer need to put in the effort to encourage people to come to the platform, but rather to get the teachers on the platform to work harder.

One investor said, "It's the same way foreign companies are starting to build factories in China and looking for new labor, they're always looking for cheaper labor to make a profit, toere's a shift in supply and demand in the market, the capitalists are bound to make a move.

Salary adjustment in the industry has started last year when it mainly affected teachers who were new to the platform. "As the industry matures, it is normal to adjust, and there is no need to use high salaries to attract more teachers to join". But the arrival of the epidemic has clearly accelerated the original pro

In May, a very well-known domestic platform released a new salary structure that eliminated the original on-time and completion bonuses and instead incentivized teachers by the number of hours they teach.

The new salary structure meant you had to spend more time on the platform, and some