iTutorGroup Reviews 10

They will call you as a parent as if its a school program consent about your child performance where else us just thier product marketing that could have just been discussed over the phone

This used to be a good school, as many adult or children classes as you wanted. Pay was OK. As far as I know, it used to be a Taiwan/Hong Kong based company, but changed to a mainland company. It quickly went downhill after the change, and then China banned foreign tutors online for Chinese kids, stating the reason as "too much pressure" on the kids, lol. Anyone who has lived and worked in China will know that is a joke. So, they lost all their market, and have pretty much gone under, I do not have any adult students either. It went from being a successful multi-millionaire company to a dead duck. If they change ownership and move to Japanese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian students they may rebound, perhaps.

I worked for this company for about 4 years and a half. In the beginning it was a great place to work and I was earning more than enough money to make a living. But in 2021 the base rate decreased significantly. Working for less than £4/lesson was absolutely soul-destroying and demeaning. The management does not respect the tutors and communication levels are absolutely awful. The company uses intimidation tactics and punitive measures. Many lesson plans are sub-par: they have typos, poor grammar, unimaginative questions and exercises, and unappealing designs. Asking professional teachers to work with those lesson plans is like giving a craftsman defective tools and saying: "Go on, work with that." The only positive aspect that remained throughout the whole experience was teaching positive, friendly and dedicated students of all ages.

In a nutshell: STAY THE HELL AWAY!

I started working for Itutor back in 2018. I was travelling in Malaysia and teaching online was a new experience for me. As a native British English teacher, they offered a good rate so I jumped on the opportunity. The on-boarding process was fairly straightforward. Not before long I was making a decent wage teaching students all over China, Taiwan and Japan. The experience was immensely enjoyable at first

My trouble started when I lost online access to my bank in Turkey. I was receiving my salary in British Pounds then convert online to USD. I requested my supervisor to simply switch my pay from Pounds Sterling to USD. She said I needed a new contract for that. When she sent the contract my rate has been cut in HALF! I protested but to no avail. My sessions score was 97% and I was doing well so this came as a shock. She said ‘oh sorry all new contracts are like this’

At about the same time I started teaching with itutor, I started having a health issue (Hypertension) which meant I needed to be careful not to get my blood pressure up. As someone who doesn’t have children, I asked itutor to switch me to adult teaching only (far less stressful). They kept saying yes then simply giving me more sessions with children, especially over the weekend. Ofcourse I knew that the majority of their clients are children so I explained my health issue and said I don’t mind teaching few sessions per week to children but I really can’t do it all the time. My supervisor would simply say ‘ok we are marking you on the system as an adults-teacher only’ then over the weekend I get a full schedule of teaching to kids. My health situation got really bad which eventually prompted me to leave Malaysia..

Before leaving I emailed my supervisor asking to put my account on hold as I would be traveling and won’t have access to stable internet. She did not respond. As I was traveling I started receiving a no-show emails. I contacted the IT Dept to say I’m traveling and asked for the account to be put on hold. They rejected the request!! So naturally, after 6 no-shows I was let go. They emailed me and thanked me for my work!

As much as I loved the interaction with the students (I’m the kind of teacher who liked to prepare, use visual aids and feed some of my life experiences into the sessions. I used to teach no more than 6 sessions per day as I wanted every session to be the best it can be!) I absolutely hated my interaction with itutor staff. They used to play dumb every time I ask a question. They really did not respect the teachers, for them it was all about the money! I heard complaints from students that they also don’t give appropriate support and sometimes they just take the money and stop caring!

Itutor group is a prime example of company without a SOUL! They operate at the forefront of an exciting market. As an experienced business consultant, I know that companies (big and small) have to balance budgets and pursue profit. I knew that when they hired me they were desperate for teachers. Later on, they wanted to claw back the money they spent on people like me. As someone who was not born in the UK, they probably looked at me and thought ‘oh this guy fooled us!’ which speak to a certain culture in Chinese & Taiwanese societies! Had they treated me like a human being, I would’ve been happy teaching with them and singing their praises to this day. There are some really horrible English teaching companies out there but having a quick look around, the itutor group have a earned a solid reputation as one of the WORST companies to work for, SHAME!

Strongly urging anyone interested in working for this company to not waste their time. Unless you are willing to work under the minimum wage, do endless hours of useless unpaid training, reserve the time for classes and get allocated classes for the one fourth of the time you reserved. Your payment can be postponed for months, and when paid they will take 6 USD bank fees out of it. Student rankings are determining your success at this job even though they can be completely unfounded and malicious. Complete waste of time for a pittance salary. Do yourself a favour and do not apply for this work.

I'd avoid working for these guys.
They pull the rug from under you without a moments notice.

Initially, after a lengthy on-boarding process, I was assigned an abundance of random 45 minute classes which pay a lower base-rate than I was led to believe during recruitment. Pay is dependent on ratings, but it's not easy to guarantee ratings from apathetic clients, so the gap between what you could hypothetically earn and what you actually earn is pretty wide. And they don't count time accrued for writing student reports after each lesson. I earned semi-decent money in the first month due to sheer amount of hours I put in.

I was then invited to complete unpaid training to "upgrade" to "more prestigious" 25-minute classes. You are told that these are more coveted, with regular students rather than randoms, and are paid better per hour. In reality, they offer you less hours of work through this, so my working hours and thus salary halved that month. And yet, I was still expected to be present online for the 40 hours a week I had committed to, even though they were only offering me a set schedule of about 16 paid hours within that.

By my third month of working here, my paid hours were ever-reducing with no explanation (when I enquired, they assured me it would pick up but it never did), as the amount of unpaid training and unpaid demo classes I was aggressively required to do increased. The final straw was when they changed the contract conditions for the third time in three months, further restricting the amount we could earn over the paltry base rate by abolishing extra money per student rating. I finally decided that it's not worth my time and handed in my two weeks notice. A few days after that, I received a warning email that they are terminating my contract due to "more than 6 no-shows" - however, my attendance has been excellent at this company, I only have a record of one instance during my early days of working for them where I made a mistake with the software and didn't log-in properly to class. These apparent no-shows on my part were only mentioned after I handed in my notice, I assume so that they don't have to pay me what I earned this month prior to quitting.

This was an extremely demeaning experience, as someone who prides myself on working hard, possessing valuable skills as an experienced teacher, and a positive and patient person. I can't warn you off this company enough. Confusing and contradictory from start to finish!

They are constantly making improvements which is good. The interview process for me wasn't smooth at all. This is because the 'IT test' software you are required to run didn't work (wouldn't submit the report). I think it's an unnecessary step to get hired. I contacted the member of staff who was managing my application and they said I need to download 'Teamviewer'. Teamviewer is a remote access software. Sorry iTutorGroup but I don't even allow friends to access my computer so why on Earth would I allow a Taiwanese company whom I have no relationship with access my computer??

"It's safe.", "Don't worry". I was told. Well, my background is actually in IT and it's common knowledge not to allow remote access to anything.

Despite this, I managed to get the IT test software working and was hired. I've been working 1 day a week for about 3 months now but rarely get any classes booked. It's not really worth getting up so early to be honest.

They are now trying to push a contract change which would actually lower my pay. Sorry, not accepting.

Hope this review helps others.

I agree with all the negative reviews online. I also did an online interview (but with a nice English girl) and was immediately offered a contract, however I did a little digging. Chinese company, very dodgy contract with many reasons why not to pay you. Thankfully I read the reviews before completing the hours of unpaid "training". This is a racket, you wont get paid.. Do not waste your time!

I applied to teach with this company and as I prepared for an online interview, I watched all of the demo videos on how they want you to teach and so forth. All the videos were done by Americans all giving their opinions on how to teach students online and so I booked an interview with a real person and reviewed their mock lesson materials which I was supposed to present to my interviewer during our video interview.
So when I learned that my interviewer was a Chinese woman in a busy call centre who barely spoke any English herself, I was immediately suspicious but tried to go ahead with the interview. Her first question she asked was if I was a native English speaker and what part of the world I live in. So I said yes, I'm a native English speaker and living in England to which she responded with, "Is that a native English speaking country?"
This is where I decided that the position wasn't for me and I signed off.
So if you're like me and your regular teaching has diminished significantly due to the coronavirus and lockdown and you're trying to find extra teaching work, then rethink this company as it's fishy to the core!