When it comes to career development in ELT, most teachers turn to the DELTA or an MA in ELT. A quick (and shocking) look online suggests the DELTA will cost £2–4000 and an MA around £7–9000. I took the MA route (but mine only cost £2500 then!) and paid a bit extra elsewhere to get in some assessed observed teaching to bring it in line with that component of the DELTA. Apart from the fact that qualification enabled me to do a DOS position at a British Council accredited summer school, I don’t think that MA enhanced my earning power at all. If you want to upskill in ELT and earn more money, you need to look outside the industry qualifications. And who better than the best business coaches for ELT? (All but one of the people I’ve listed below have a direct connection to ELT.)
Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That would mean I may get a small commission if you purchase anything at some point from some of them but rest assured it’s not influenced who I chose and it makes no difference to the price you pay.
Both of the traditional avenues will turn you into the kind of teacher who cares passionately about the science and the art of teaching and language learning and just as passionately about the outcome for your students. Unfortunately, they also seem to strip you of any self-care for your own outcomes. For the most part, they handcuff you to a badly-paid industry, one that you invested in a TEFL qualification to enter and have carried on investing your time (and, often, more money) in the form of paying for your own CPD by going to conferences. So if you’re researching MA vs DELTA, you might want to know that there is an alternative route…
Here’s how to actually learn something that will lead to more money, more freedom and even be useful outside the teaching world. Not to mention costing significantly less than a DELTA or MA in ELT and will probably earn itself back within a short space of time.
What skills do you need to earn more in ELT?
One thing I’m pretty sure you don’t need any more of is yet more training on how to teach better. If you’ve done a TEFL and have some experience, attended some online or in-person workshops, and swapped ideas with other teachers in the staffroom or on the internet, you’re already more than good enough. I promise.
Yet, somehow none of that translates to well-paid work. Unless, maybe if you get a secure full-time position in a high-paying country in a university or international school. Though for the latter you tend to need a PGCE or other mainstream teaching qualification.
But every freelancer or poorly-paid academy/Preply teacher who wants to earn more needs business skills. There are millions of people who want and need English and are willing to pay experts. Until fairly recently, they had to go to schools to find teachers and, there, they usually got pawned off with generalists teaching conversation or generic Business English. Now you can find them and they can find you if you have the business skills to research, develop, market and sell to a niche client who’s looking for exactly what you can offer. You won’t learn ANY of the skills you need to do that on a TEFL, DELTA or MA course. So, honestly, if you’re currently thinking about doing one of those, read this post first and add these kinds of courses into the decision-making mix!
But, if you want to learn how to stop trading your hours for money, here are the best business coaches for ELT. They’ll help you build a business based on things like group and online courses, digital products and memberships.
Ola Kowalska: Business coaching for language educators
Ola Kowalsa is a teacher turned teacher trainer turned business coach who used to run her own language school.
She’s also one of those people whose sheer energy draws you in, as you’ll know if you’ve ever listened to her podcast, Get Richer, Teacher.
As the podcast title suggests, one thing Ola is very vocal about is earning money and not being shy about that being one of your aims in business. Her course and coaching program distil everything she knows about building a profitable and sustainable language teaching business. Scroll down the sales page for her flagship Rocket Accelerator program and you’ll see glowing testimonials from some of the hundreds of teachers she’s helped learn the business skills to transform their working lives and operate a business that gives freedom.
Transformational is the key message here. Ola isn’t just teaching the business skills, it’s the mindset change that’s so important too. I’ve never formally worked with Ola but we once had a call for an interview as part of a summit she was organising and I was speaking. After the recording part was done, we were just chatting and I was talking about an offer I was about to beta test. Her off-the-cuff informal advice led me to confidently increase the price from the too-low amount I was about to set. But much more valuable was that something she mentioned showed me how to tweak the offer so it was worth double WITHOUT giving myself any extra work by simply adding in things I’d already created. It’s a no-brainer that I am therefore planning to get coaching from Ola next year as the mindset stuff is something I still have to work on (though I think I have most of the business skills now). I’ll report back when I do!
The Rocket Accelerator is a 6-month program with coaching and a community built in and, if it’s not currently enrolling, you can sign up to find out when the next one is. Or, you could try the Rocket Fuel course which is self-paced and shorter (a 6-week sprint) as it focuses on marketing strategies for social media and actually giving you tasks to implement so you get results even before you finish the course.
Rachael Roberts: Foundational business skills
Rachael is a former ELT teacher, teacher trainer and ELT materials writer turned ELT Business Coach.
I knew her from crossing paths in materials writing circles and was peripherally aware that she had moved into coaching. So, when I was looking to change what I was doing because I was hating materials writing and had an idea for a business, I turned to her.
Luckily for me, her coaching business had evolved into a full group business program that taught all the skills I needed. Plus more that I wouldn’t have known I needed. I finished her program in May 2022 and had sold out the beta version of my beginner investing course for people in ELT by the end of June. I’d paid the course fee back well within the same year too.
Rachael’s group program, Designed to Flourish, is aimed at ELT freelancers, so that might be teachers, teacher trainers or ELT writers, editors and publishers. The program is a hybrid course spanning 6 months with a mix of self-study lessons and live group and personalised individual coaching and feedback. You’ll cover things like identifying and validating your business idea, what business model to adopt, what to put on your website (this was a big one for me!), how to design and launch your offer, and how to market it to attract the right kind of clients.
Gydion Kummer: Building memberships and systems
Gydion Kummer learned marketing from working for IT companies in the UK.
Before that he was an English teacher himself, earning low rates with language academies until he figured out how to use his marketing skills to ditch them and build his own business.
Now he helps other English teachers do the same and he excels at the systems you need to scale. Just his LinkedIn posts are incredibly insightful and original too and he regularly gives me things to think about.
Gydion offers a low-cost membership, Academy Launch Community, on exactly that: building subscription memberships. He also sells Academy in a Box, all the software you need to run an online language school or coaching program and a business training program on how to offer and market premium courses so you target specific types of clients with specific needs rather than generic offers like “conversation classes”. His results and testimonials are something else!
Sandra Pyne: How to run a phonics tutoring business
Sandra is a former international teacher, current tutor and qualified dyslexia & literacy specialist. She teaches people how to run successful tutoring businessed.
Private tutoring in some countries is big business, ranging from families looking for additional help or who want to homeschool.
Most teachers start off with word of mouth referrals but that will only get you so far if you don’t have the ability to market yourself. So to help with that, Sandra runs JIgsaw Phonics which is a membership to help teachers set up their own tutoring business offering phonics and literacy support.
Sandra offers business and marketing support as well as a full curriculum of 90 no-prep lessons, resources, homework and assessment materialsm and certificates so you have everything you need for your students to get great results but without spending hours hunting down materials. She also has people on her team who can help with branding and websites so you can set up a professional-looking business. And, if you want to see what kinds of businesses people set up after working with Jigsaw Phonics, check out the testimonials as they list their websites under their glowing reviews.
James Liu: How to get $100 an hour students
I’ve never taken any of James Liu’s offers but he was one of the first ELT business coaches I heard about as he was on an ELT podcast talking about his own story and the “why” of his coaching method. The biggest difference between James and the other coaches working with ELT people is he was never a teacher.
He’s a Harvard trained Management Consultant but he was once a struggling student of English in the US and basically felt badly about how little his teachers were earning even while they were, in his words, catapulting him ahead in his life and career.
So James now runs Bowei Strategy with the mission to help teachers turn their teaching expertise into income, impact, and freedom.
Now, because of James’ hardcore business background, for some people it’s too much. For others, it’s just learning the same business skills as other industries use and why not? Reading around, you’ll see big fans testifying to the success they’ve had following James Liu’s strategies (and he now works alongside two ELT teachers who used his methods and started getting high-paying students Robbie Kane and Stefy Vaclavikova). But there are others complaining that it didn’t work for them. I have to say that, reading a lot of the complaints, it sounded to me like “this running a business thing turned out to be hard work and I was expecting a magic wand” was a common theme. But anyway, as with any programme, it’s possible you won’t like all the techniques you learn. One way of giving it a try is to take the 21-day challenge and see if the Bowei Strategy is for you or not. It’s a relatively low cost way into learning how to niche and sell your services to new clients.
Andrew Woodbury: Become a teacher-preneur
Teacher-preneur is just another way of saying earn your own income and ditch the precarity and low pay of working for language schools. But I like the way it puts a business slant onto the whole thing straight away.
Together with Leo Gomez and Michale Landry, Andrew Woodbury is one of the trio running Learn Your English Network. Based in Canada, they approach business as aiming to solve a very specific problem for a specific client and then broadening that out to find more clients like that first one.
As well as teaching the solid business skills to get you identifying your niche and getting online paid clients within 30 days, LYE is also really into the pedagogy of ELT and Task Based Learning in particular. So if the pure business angle of the other programs in this list makes you start yearning for the DELTA againm working with these guys could satisfy both the desire to earn more money and the urge to hone your teaching.
Jo Gakonga: Video-making for ELT
If you want to build self-access courses, or make video for social media marketing or YouTube, Jo Gakonga has an excellent group program, VoiCE, on how to make video.
Jo is a seasoned ELT teacher and teacher trainer and she has a YouTube channel aimed at teachers which has over 45,000 subscribers. The VoiCE course (Video Creation for Educators) gives you the practical know-how to create and edit video in an 8-week online group program..
I did her course in 2022 and created all the video content for my courses as a result. So now I have some courses that are 100% self study which means I can sell them anytime. I also have my main course for people in ELT who want to learn about investing which is a hybrid offer of self-study video content and live classes. Before that, I only had that course, and I ran it 100% live via 90-minute sessions once a week. The free time I gained by turning it into a hybrid course allowed me to create the other courses and to have alternative revenue streams AND the time to create content to market them. Next on my list is a YouTube channel. Coming soon.
I can’t recommend Jo’s course highly enough. She gives you feedback and support every week until you fully get the technical video-making and editing skills. She’s got so much experience of running a successful ELT YouTube channel and online courses for teachers that she gives business advice too. And it’s really fun and creative. I was sorry when it ended and see that feeling expressed by other cohorts in the Facebook group. Oh, and the course price includes lifetime access to Camtasia editing software valued at £290. I still use that software to make my videos 2 years later.
Lizzy Goddard: Fun digital business strategies
She’s not strictly one of the best business coaches for ELT as she’s an online business strategist. But for pure digital business strategy that teachers can easily adopt is Lizzy Goddard is great.
I’ve done quite a few of Lizzy’s courses and have learned sales strategies like tripwires, order bumps and upsells. Lizzy has lots of unique business ideas and her Rock Your Day of Voxer course about how to offer and sell support for a day via a messaging service like WhatsApp or Voxer would be perfect for English teachers. Clients get a day of voice and text message support, or she has a smaller course on offering a similar set up with group courses as an alternative to holding live online classes or calls. It needs a separate post to go through all the Lizzy training courses I’ve done and implemented so I’ll write that soon.
Some of the links in this post were affiliate links. That would mean I may get a small commission if you purchase anything at some point from some of them but rest assured it’s not influenced who I chose and it makes no difference to the price you pay.
If you want to work with me, I don’t coach business but I can teach and coach you through making the most of the earnings you get from that business, via a course or 1-2-1.