tutor

sales representative

operations associate

educational consultant

engagement specialist

Varsity Tutors

Honestly, this was probably one of the worst jobs I ever had.  I was looking forward to this because it seemed like a good place - they strive for education, remote job that you can work at home, the job itself seemed doable yet challenging enough to keep you going.  During my interview, I was told there was "no cap" on what you can make.  My interviewer went over the guidelines that you get a base salary and then bonuses on top.  However, no cap is usually talking about commission only to find out that you don't get commission at all... you get a joke of a bonus which is barely worth the effort you put in.  And trust me... you work A LOT.  There's virtually no work life balance.  They have a schedule that alternates every weekend, two evenings during the week, and barely any time off.  I had to work 6 day stretches quite often with a brief day off and then more work.  The days off were so spread out so it was almost like I was constantly working.  You also need to put in days off a month in advance for anything and it becomes next to impossible to do it.  The next red flag is that the company literally looks for ways to make you work fully without having any sort of downtime.  You get timed for calls and penalized if you go over, you get measured on sales and penalized if you don't reach them... it's a very fear based system.  Overall, you're expected to constantly stay on the phones and make call after call after call to people that don't want to talk to you in an attempt to pitch and sell products that you receive barely any compensation for with threats that you lose your job if you don't.  That's the motto, you have to make your numbers or you're fired.  Granted, any sales job is going to have metrics that you are expected to meet but here you're expected to work your hardest and sell for absolutely no commission.  At the beginning, my interviewer highlighted this job as taking care of other people's accounts, providing service, and selling new products on those accounts.  Only to find out that you're doing nothing but phone grinding and forced into a position where you basically have to stay constantly on the phones and meet your metrics.  Not to mention that you barely even work on your own accounts.  People will sell on your accounts, work with customers on your accounts, and basically pass people off constantly.  The phones will automatically dial and there's no resolution... basically if you have  a follow up call, somebody else will take it.  You want to make a sale?  Somebody else will take it.  There's no consistency and follow up with relationship building... clients will literally speak with a different person each time and have to explain their situation about 7 times.  Not to mention the account managers will need to review the account and be brought up to speed with a situation that somebody else was working on.  Instead of having the person that was working on the situation complete it as they were involved and making a resolution which would also help build rapport - it instead just gets passed on to the next person.  Don't be fooled up front... the interviewer will sell this job as something it's not.  They will also have all these little contests and bonuses that they have throughout the company where you can win $20 or $50 for selling tens of thousands of dollars worth or products... don't you feel rewarded yet?  I literally won a contest and didn't receive the $50 I was promised... seems like it was a lie just to get me to sell something.  There was also a promotion where if you put in 4 hours of overtime over a weekend you either receive free lunch or $30.  I put in the overtime and nope... nothing.  Ultimately, you're chained to live in a constant state of fear with having to live up to their metrics or you get fired.  It's VERY oppressive.  And remote?  You work from home but you still have to log on at certain times and work constantly throughout the day for 8 hours.  It seems like they have to put all these guidelines on employees just to make them give up blood, sweat, and tears for next to nothing in return.  Except the employees are FORCED to give up these things.  You also find yourself in a predicament if you work out of state or go to another area but finding time to do these things are far and in between.  I've also seen them do this to their customers where they have them sign a form at the beginning and then have their hours expire after a year where people are paying copious amounts of money only to end up losing them.  It's a very dirty practice and the employees are treated much the same.   Overall, they have constant agreement signing to cover up their own bad practices so they can essentially use people for profit and get away with it.  Do yourself a favor and go somewhere with more flexibility and better practices - not to mention a job that will fairly compensate you for your effort.  

First, let’s talk about that pay because times are uncertain, right? And, we all need income. As an Independent Contractor, you always have a base pay of $15. This can fluctuate depending on whether you’re teaching a special small group ($20/hr) or a Virtual School Day group ($30). Tutors are asked to submit invoices immediately following the end of your session. If you teach daily (Ex. Mon-Fri) and do this, you can be paid twice a week via direct deposit. Who doesn’t love that?! Now, let’s get down to the business of working at this great company as an Independent Contractor...

One of my angsts of attempting to work as an ESL tutor with another company was their requirement to FIND your own students to tutor. Which meant promoting myself! This blew my mind and I never did pursued That work after passing all of the certifications. It was a waste of time in my opinion. This is not the case at Varsity Tutors. 

Via a handy app you download to your tablet/phone, you are sent a variety of opportunities aligned with your approved content area that the company believes you are qualified to teach. You can select your interest to be considered to teach the course, or refuse the opportunity if your schedule isn’t open, or if you’re not comfortable with the subject. It even gives you an option to request a different time, and if the staff can accommodate your request, you could confirm that opportunity. Basically, you choose how much or how little you want to teach, and what courses you are best suited to teach. 

As expected, TUTORS must develop the lesson plans for their courses. But what I LOVE is that you design that plan according to the expectations VT includes in the listing, and you teach what you want, how you deem best for that course. Once you meet your students, you then set the pace based on them and their learning styles.

In webinars (large groups taught via Zoom), Tutors are given awesome moderators that work with you to mainly moderate your chat while you teach and manage the technical side of Zoom to engage your students. But, you should always set your classroom management plan in place FIRST DAY so students know Mrs. Tutor is kind, but she expects you to participate and be respectful at all times. In small group/private tutoring sessions, Tutors do not have a moderator, but again, you set the tone for that class.

Every time I have called for support, I have gotten great people to respond to any issues immediately. Technical help via email was great, but responses from the group care team could be better. I emailed for assistance and was directed to send an email to another email address to inquire about having guest instructors on for a session. I never received a response to my request although the auto-response email indicated someone would get back with me within 24 hours. Thankfully, my inquiry was simple to address and what I tried worked out.

In a nutshell, if you are seeking to use your educator skills or want to share your talents with youngsters, and get decent pay for it while teaching from wherever you are, this is the place for you! 

Great staff, access to parents (some are right in the room while the child is on in case you need their immediate support), good pay received weekly (twice per week if you’re teaching daily), and an online schedule that tracks all of your students, courses and your tutoring schedule! So advanced and streamlines the tutoring process. You have little to no paperwork to concern yourself with.

The Varsity Tutors opportunity allows educators to return to a love for teaching without all of the politics and paperwork in place that prevent them from doing what they really love — effectively working with the students.

What I like most about Varsity Tutors is that unlike many other tutoring sites, they help tutor-student match-ups personally, and once matched, allow the tutor to continue with the student as long as it is mutually agreed upon - they are completely hands-off.  This long term interaction provides time to customize teaching techniques for each student, and also allows you to monitor your effectiveness and the students' progress through an entire quarter/semester as with an in-person course.  I don't feel like a call-center person trying to help a different student or even multiple students simultaneously during each session.  Given I work multiple jobs, I really love the time-flexibility and "security" of the job - the fact that you can set up a mutually convenient meeting schedule with students over the long-term.   

The thing I would really like to see improvement on is the fixed "flat-rate" pay of $15/hr - irrespective of (a) the level of difficulty (in terms of prep-work, developing customized learning plans, etc...); (b) the amount they charge the client ("student"), (c) the amount of time worked at VT (experience), or (d) cumulative review scores.  While I haven't asked students for explicit numbers,  the impression I got was that  VT may charge the student different rates based on course level (high-school, college, professional degree).  However, they pay tutors the same flat rate!  That means, the above fixed tutor pay likely amounts to 15-30% of what the client (student) is actually charged.  While I understand they are providing the infrastructure/contacts to match up tutors and students as well as tutoring tools (e.g., the workboard, text/equation editors, etc.),  I feel the pay-rate is a bit exploitative.  At some point during the term, I have had to let nearly every student know I spend a significant amount of time in prep-work (as with teaching any in-person class), and how much I am actually paid (to their shock) - because based on what they are paying, they expect me to be available and spend additional time outside of the scheduled tutoring time-slot - for providing supportive material, answer email questions regarding additional homework/test problems, or review/critique their written solutions.  I still end up doing all this extra work sometimes based on the urgency/ciriticality of a student's needs - but resulting in a net compensation equivalent to the federal minimum wage!  

Many of us are doing this out of a passion for the subject and wanting to help out others with our knowledge - and with a customized student-specific approach, I also see tremendous improvement in students understanding/performance towards the end of the course.  So, it would be wonderful to see all this extra effort, and results, to translate into a more "livable" (merit-based) compensation - especially when experience and reviews warrant it.  While I could take on more teaching hours, owing to the intensity/nature of tutoring, I find that my effectiveness and efficiency drops if I am teaching 20+ hrs per week (equivalent to ~ 30+ hrs/week including prep-time and follow-up time!), besides resulting in a meager "net-pay" to show for it!

I cannot stress how much I do not recommend working for this company. The first couple days of onboarding are a dream; the people are very nice, they sell the companies goals and ethics to you like they're saints, and you're getting paid to sit there and mostly watch slide shows about how great they are. Everything after that is a total decline. 
As I said they spend a good chunk of training teaching you about the company itself with little focus on actual training. Then, the last few days they throw everything you should have been taught from the beginning and expect you to memorize it. I was put on the phones the last couple days of training taking INBOUND CALLS one after the other with such minimal knowledge I could barely even navigate the database. Then at the end of the day we were put back into training only to find out we were all doing the wrong things because they were just starting to teach us about their multitudes of options, how to input clients personal info, how to close out deals, and how to take their payments. 
We were specifically taught to not answer any questions about prices until AFTER we had spent over 30 minutes on the phone consulting with the client. If they asked before then, we were instructed to divert the question and tell them we need more information even though we could easily plug in their needs and availability to calculate a pretty accurate quote within 2 minutes of the conversation. We had to quote them the highest priced packages which would come out to literal thousands of dollars. Only after we got yelled at by the client for wasting their time (rightfully so) and after we go through VT's required script of how their prices are fair for the standard and they won't get the right help anywhere else, were we "allowed" to walk down the price to lower packages to the already fuming person on the other end. In fact, when we were taught about this during training, a brave person in my group told the manager how upsetting they would find it if someone had the audacity to do that to them.
Most calls end up in voicemails (that we were taught to leave at least 12 times but usually more), answers and immediate hang up when they realize who's calling, an answer from someone yelling that we are harassing them (which is fair), or conversations that last upwards to well over an hour that end in no sale being made because of prices.
All of this wouldn't be as bad if management weren't shoving down our throats how much numbers really matter. No commission is made from sales but they expect you to act like there is. The only way to make sales is to do the total opposite of what you're taught but, like most call center jobs, they record your calls and listen to them for "quality checking".
They tell you from the beginning that everyone is valuable and how there is so much growth in the company but you just have to get through the 9 week onboarding process before they can label you full time and give you benefits. Meanwhile they immediately have you to take on full time hours, push overtime, and mandatory weekends. Spoiler alert: people get dropped FAST. Unless you are pulling in thousands of dollars in deals multiple times a day and committing to 8 hour days, 5-6 days a week, they will not keep you. 
The pay may look nice but having only worked there for a couple of weeks before having to quit because of my inadequate training and insane quotas, and complete lack of work/life balance, I truly believe they should be paying sales workers SO much more. 

MY OVERVIEW - I came from a previous sales background, but found myself needing remote work to answer my home's needs at the time. In my previous roles, I was given the flexibility to have a consultative approach to understanding my client's needs (a client that came to my company first and was not being trapped into conversation!) and the proprietary tools necessary to sell a solution to said client that benefited them and my company. At VT, you are told to sell a product, mostly tutoring, that is not customized enough to the present needs of the client. You are expected to impose more product than the customer needs to get higher sales, rather than sell less to more people and earn more clients this way. VT's present business model is attached to Nerdy, the parent company, and it's dive into public trading soon. This is mostly evident in there pricing scheme, that did not change, even after transitioning to a completely online company. They say we are a customer first institution, but in practice, it is a numbers driven company that does not mind how it achieves those figures. 

A typical day at work - You get to create your own home office, sort it out yourself to your needs. Talk into a headset, while standing or sitting, for about 4-8 hours depending on shift length.

Workplace culture - Do you like expressing your feelings in GIFs? Then this the place for you. The company communication feature is reminiscent of the early days of Yahoo! chat and is equal parts try-hard to be a "hip" start-up and late night fraternity banter......and that's the OFFICIAL means of communication.

Hardest part of the job - Selling an overvalued product to a customer base that needs help in the most consequential parts of their lives. 

Most enjoyable part of the job - It's good knowing I do not provide my services here for free. Also, there are frequent "meetings" that you get invited to that you can zone out of and get paid to attend.

What I've learned - I look forward to never working in a call center environment again.

After 4 days of "training" you are placed on the phones to sell a product that you have yet to be fully introduced to. The training is not very well thought out, despite this being a educational servicing company that prizes virtual pedagogy. Be prepared to find yourself in a sink-or-swim situation after the first week. By the way, you are told you are not doing any cold calls, but you will be as most of the "leads" you are fed early on are harvested from clickbait. Your online presence is constantly monitored, on a provided laptop, and will be subject to management scrutiny on the regular. 

Speaking of management, that is something you will be doing often. Whether it is during your 1 of 2 meetings with your team leader a week or a MOD pinging you, asking you if you want swap shifts for chances to win gift cards. Managers will nit pick your calls to find ways that you did not  up sell and do not like to hear when you tell them that you understood that the client did not need more than what you attempted to sell. The micromanagement culture here is strong and is most likely the leading contributor to turnover. 

Prediction: Most of the high level executives that recently joined, mostly from Amazon, will take their bargained share of the company, sell and leave a short while after it goes public. 

I started working at Varsity Tutors in July of this year. When I applied for the Educational Account Manager position in June, there was absolutely no mention that the role involved sales. I discovered the sales aspect of the position after training and decided to go with it - after all, it is a job. I found that I was grossly underprepared for what the role requires. I left recently due to the stress of the position and blatant disregard for consumers and employees. Here's what to expect for when working as an Educational Account Manager/Client Sales Representative at Varsity Tutors:

After a week of rushed training, you are placed on the phones to outbound and receive calls for each shift. You are given a script and expected to pursue a sale on every call. During the RAMP (training/coaching) stage, you meet with your manager twice per week to review metrics and receive call coaching to improve your sales. You spend about 4-8 weeks in RAMP before being moved to a tenured team. Once on a tenured team, you are immediately given a quota to meet for the month (30% of what a fully tenured rep is expected to meet). You are given clients and pushed to sell as many tutoring hours as possible to them, even if those hours are beyond what the clients need. Even when you make a large sale that makes sense for a client, you are always asked about the "missed opportunity" to sell more hours to them that the client doesn't need. You'll reach out to managers for support throughout the day and are lucky if you get a response regarding serious or escalated matters. If you don't hit your quota at the end of your first month on a tenured team, you are given a higher quota for your second month, as well as double the clients to manage. The new sales reps often lie/mislead clients about tutor placement expectations, so account management consists of resetting expectations, de-escalating angry clients, deflecting refunds, and troubleshooting technical issues. You are expected to "pivot" to recommending a sale on every call that you take, regardless of if the client has just purchased or is extremely angry about their current experience. You are strongly encouraged to process as few refunds as possible, even if the client has valid reasons for requesting a refund (i.e. finding in-person tutoring, multiple unsuccessful tutor matches, etc.).You are expected to emotionally manipulate clients into staying or purchasing more hours through highlighting their current struggles, the pandemic, and any other personal factors they mention to you. As a newly tenured rep, this will be a difficult transition with a steep learning curve, but don't worry! Your tenured team manager will give you useless platitudes and tell you to work overtime as a solution. Don't forget - overtime is a requirement during peak season, in addition to the weekend and evening shifts that you already work throughout each week. 

If you enjoy misleading clients, stressful sales environments, and having no separation or work and personal life, then Varsity Tutors is the place for you!

What is the best part of working at the company?
The best part was working directly with students and seeing their progress. A number of students were appreciative, engaged, and motivated, and helping them succeed was the only consistently rewarding part of the experience. In my case, the positive side of the job came from my own teaching and the relationships I built with students, not from the company’s systems, support, or management. Some students and families were kind and genuinely valued the quality of my instruction. Beyond that, it is difficult for me to identify meaningful strengths in the company itself.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part was the ongoing lack of support, poor communication, repeated operational issues, and the feeling that tutors were undervalued and easily disposable. Problems that should have been simple to fix often required repeated follow-up, and even then responses were slow, inconsistent, or absent. Payment-related issues, platform problems, scheduling frustrations, and ignored emails created a constant sense of instability. It was exhausting to spend professional time chasing basic corrections and trying to get clear answers from departments that often seemed disorganized or unresponsive. The stress did not come from teaching students; it came from dealing with the company.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
In my experience, the work environment felt impersonal, unresponsive, and heavily tilted in the company’s favor. There was little sense that experienced educators were respected as professionals. Instead, the culture often felt transactional: tutors were expected to deliver high-quality instruction while receiving limited recognition, limited support, and compensation that did not reflect their qualifications. Communication often felt one-sided. When tutors raised legitimate concerns or offered detailed feedback, it frequently seemed to disappear into a void. Overall, the culture gave me the impression of an organization more focused on scale and control than on educational quality, fairness, or professional respect.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
A typical day involved preparing seriously for students, teaching sessions with care, and trying to deliver the best possible instruction despite the platform. The teaching itself could be meaningful, but the administrative side was often frustrating. If something went wrong, whether related to payment, scheduling, platform functionality, or support, it could become an unnecessary headache. Instead of being able to focus entirely on students, I sometimes had to spend extra time documenting issues, following up on errors, and trying to get responses that should have come much sooner. The contrast between the quality I tried to provide and the quality of support from the company was often striking.

Training is advertised as 2 weeks but you're thrown on phone calls on day 5 while being observed and heavily critiqued. Its all sunshine during training but once you're on the floor they expect the MOST within your first month with no grace that you JUST started and knowingly hiring people with no experience in sales. (hitting metrics and having successful sales) MIND YOU new hires are trained to follow a script and transfer to a Senior Rep which the sale closing depends overall on that person you transfer to so I didn't quite understand why closed sales went into our metrics as the Initial Consultant. You're making about 100+ outbound and inbound calls per day, back to back, where majority of it is leaving voicemails, calling DEAD leads and being berated and yelled at by annoyed customers because we continuously call them more than 10 times a day or every other day. Its not until they curse us out that we are to mark them as "declined" The micromanaging is INSANE if you aren't hitting your metrics be prepared for your manager to randomly listen to your live phone calls and message you on the side in the middle of that phone call asking you questions and giving feedback WHILE talking to someone. Adding an insane amount of preassure and anxiety to your day. It honestly got to a point where I grew physically ill just at the thought of logging on for the day. The hours are very hard if you have children. I would say the only good thing that came from this experience was meeting my colleagues who are all very kind but also expressed the same concerns I had throughout training and even after.

Another random thing that I just did not like was that we got A LOT of leads that spoke either Spanish or French yet we have NO deparment or team of people to transfer them to on the phone. We are instructed to just end the call if they don't have someone to translate on the phone with them and send them an email in their language - and from there they are expected to enroll themselves in the program without having any of their initial questions answered. I find this incredibly unethical and a bit discriminatory since there were SO many foreign speaking leads that genuinely wanted the help but we're just expected to tell them "too bad we don't have anyone to help you on the phone right now so heres an email, good luck." 

Varsity Tutors has the vision and potential but the execution is horrible. I never felt so much anxiety or micro management from ANY place I've worked for. And I have experience in customer service and remote work where it was not nearly as bad as this place

I came into this position with several years of teaching and tutoring experience across pretty much every grade level (pre-K to grad students). I was unable to get a steady teaching job lined up because of the pandemic, so I gave VT a shot. The hiring process was insanely fast (like 1-2 days), probably because of my experience, and it was really easy to set up my schedule. There was no real training for this job, but this wasn't an issue for me because of my experience. I could see how this might be frustrating for clients, though, because they really don't know what they're getting until they have a session with someone.

While I can choose what days and times I feel comfortable working and say "yes" or "no" to opportunities as they come in, it can be really frustrating trying to get work at the beginning. All opportunities for subjects you teach (and sometimes subjects out of your comfort zone) are sent out to the appropriate people at once, so it's first-come first-serve. But even if you say that you're "interested" as soon as the opportunity shows up, it'll be assigned to another tutor unless you have all 5-star client ratings. If you're brand new to VT, then that can be very frustrating.

I did manage to luck out when I accepted some teaching opportunities and a VT representative called me. Because she had me on the line, she was able to assign me to basically any class I wanted to teach. After that, it felt like almost anytime I chose an opportunity, I got it.

But then the lovely rating system came in. I had had two 5-star reviews from clients when someone gave me 4 stars (with no feedback). While I didn't think this would be an issue because I didn't see that as a bad rating, it dropped me from a 5 overall to a 4.6. Now, I wasn't getting any opportunities no matter how fast I clicked. I've had maybe a couple pan out since then, but it's been rough.

I do have to say that, generally speaking, it is nice to not have a boss to report to, but it can be frustrating to have to call customer service whenever there's an issue. I've had to do this with incorrect payments (which is a pain when they mess up the course code in the system), or for a webinar when the moderator didn't show up and I couldn't get into the session (we had to start late). There's also a lot of inconsistency in the moderators, from ones who are very helpful to ones who don't do anything to manage the chat. I also don't have access to a lot of the materials I need for class, which means a lot of lesson planning and work outside of my paid time (since I'm only paid when I'm tutoring).

Varsity Tutors used to send me multiple job opportunities daily. I was logged in 24/7 and received no less than 10 opportunities every day. It all changed after they started to take my students out of my roster before I submitted my final invoice for the final session with them. When the student is not in the roster, the tutor can't invoice the session with that student. And whenever the students were supposed to have their final session they were on my roster up to the time when I scheduled their final session, but after I had provided the session and tried to invoice it, I would discover that the student is mysteriously removed from the roster and I can't invoice the session. It happened a few times. I tried to call, but nobody answers the phone. I left voice mails, but nobody called back. I emailed, but no one replied. Finally, I wrote an email that would definitely catch their attention. I said that if they keep treating me like that I will take my students and work with them outside of Varsity Tutors system. I knew very well about the terms of the contract that indicated the no solicitation agreement, but that was the only way to make Varsity Tutors react somehow on my emails and messages. They finally reactivated the student on my roster and enabled the invoicing. Moreover, I got a call from a manager who threatened to cancel my contract for meeting tutoring their students outside of their system. I explained him the situation, and heard that not only I have to provide tutoring, but also call or email them to get paid if they failed to do their job correctly and removed the student from the roster too early. You know what, this is too much! They charge the student very high rates and hardly pay the third of it to the tutors. These "wonderful" managers keep the 2/3 of the money they charge the students to themselves and can't even do their job correctly. They want the tutors to tutor the students for a few pennies, but in order to et those pennies, the tutors are also supposed to spend half-a-day calling and emailing them. I sent an email complaining about their attitude and work ethics. I never provided sessions to Varsity Tutors students outside of their company. My contract was never cancelled, however I don't get any more tutoring opportunities. I get text messages that there are opportunities available, but they never show up on my tutor account in the computer. The Varsity Tutors tech department claims that there are no tech issues with my account. This means that they just stopped sending me opportunities, because I told them to be more ethical in their work relationships with the tutors and do their job more accurately. Terrible company with very low work ethics!

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Tutor 100 salaries reported	$19.80 per hour
Sales representative 4 salaries reported	$65,000 per year
Operations associate 5 salaries reported	$43,000 per year
Educational consultant 3 salaries reported	$43,333 per year
Engagement specialist 4 salaries reported	$36,250 per year

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