Tutoring can be a great way to supplement your income or a full-time job in its own right. You can tutor almost anything as long as you have the knowledge and skills and nursing is no exception.
Are you interested in teaching your skills in nursing to students?
Here's our handy guide to becoming a nursing tutor.
Become a Qualified and Registered Nurse
Every tutor needs two main skills, teaching skills and in-depth knowledge of their subject matter. Before you can even consider tutoring nursing, you'll need to become a registered nurse.
In other fields and subjects, you mightn't need any formal qualification to tutor, but when it comes to nursing, you definitely do!
Formally, nurse educators are responsible for training nurses in Australia and they're already registered nurses who've studied a degree in nursing at university.
Nurse educators usually need to complete a postgraduate degree in nurse education or similar.
Tutoring
Usually, especially in a field like nursing, tutoring complements formal training. To tutor nursing privately, you won't technically need formal qualifications in nurse education, but it won't hurt to have them.
Most commonly, your tutoring job will involve helping nursing students to wrap their heads around everything they need to ktor to become registered nurses themselves, which is why you need to have been through it yourself.
And while not required, studying pedagogy and different teaching approaches won't hurt either. You need to pass your skills onto your students effectively and what works for some mightn't work for others.
Once you have both your nursing qualifications and teaching skills, you're ready to start making it as a nursing tutor.
But you're going to need students...
Finding Students as a Nursing Tutor
Being a tutor is a great way to run your own business and be your own boss. This means that you also have to wear multiple hats and marketing your business is part of it.
For your tutoring to be successful, you'll need happy students who'll pay for your service and for your tutoring career to be sustainable, you'll need a steady flow of students as long-term students graduate and become nurses and no longer require your tutoring.
Online
In the digital age, online resources are still a great way to go. You need to be present in the online spaces where potential students congregate as well as on tutoring sites that help students and tutors find one another.
There are free and paid-for versions out there and it's worthwhile being on as many of them as your can in order to broaden your reach.
Social Media
It's not a bad idea to use social media, too. You can use your personal social media, but dedicated social media accounts for your tutoring services also scream professionalism and they're free.
Set them up and use them. Share, repost, and retweet your stuff on your personal accounts, too, so that everybody knows that you offer nursing tutoring. Word of mouth is likely to be where you find your first students and your first referrals.
A Website
Nowadays, it's very easy to get your own website or digital space to advertise your nursing classes and tutoring services. Websites are also great because you control the content that visitors see, unlike social media, which can sometimes bury your content and posts, even on your friends' and followers' timelines in favour of something that the algorithm likes more.
A website doesn't need to be complicated. Just show the very best side of what you do and make sure there are some really clear instructions on how potential students can get in touch to arrange a session.
In the Real World
You can still go old-school when sourcing students. You can put up posters advertising your tutoring services in places like libraries and universities where you're most likely to find nursing students. Think about where somebody studying nursing is likely to see an ad or a poster for your tutoring and make sure yours is the first they see.
Of course, always ask permission whenever you put up posters. Illegally posting ads can not only land you in hot water, but it can also look very unprofessional for these kinds of tutoring services.
Find out more on finding students as a nursing tutor
Pricing Your Nursing Tutoring Sessions
How much you charge for your nursing lessons is entirely up to you, but there are several things you need to consider when setting your rates.
Work Backwards
As a rule of thumb, it's a good idea to start with how much money you need to make and work backwards from there. Work out your expenses, desired earnings, travel time, and how many sessions you could offer a week.
Once you know all of this, you'll be able to work out the very minimum you should be charging for each lesson. Any less, and you'll end up losing money.
Charge What Your Nursing Tutoring is Worth
You don't want to just get by, though. You'll want to make an amount of money that's fair. An amount justified by your experience, skills, and all the time and money you've already invested into becoming a registered nurse and honing your tutoring skills.
In this case, you'll likely want to look at the average earnings of other tutors in your field and how much they charge.
Supply and Demand
When you have a rough idea of how much you want to charge, you'll then need to consider the market. Supply and demand can play a big part in your rates. If you're the only nursing tutor in town, then you're in a good position to ask for more. In a city full of nursing tutors, you'll have to either charge less to entice students or offer an unbeatable service that students will happily pay hand over fist for.
The more students you have, the more you can charge. You may have to start with rates lower than you'd like, but as you gain a reputation and a full schedule, you can start increasing your rates up to reflect the demand for your tutoring.
Find out more about pricing your nursing tutoring sessions
The Advantages of Becoming a Nursing Tutor
Tutoring and teaching share a lot of similarities, but there are also a whole bunch of advantages to tutoring over teaching.
Qualifications and Formalities
The first key difference is the formalities. Teaching requires specific qualifications, degrees, etc. Tutoring doesn't really require this. While it doesn't hurt to have these qualifications, you can tutor without them. Your students won't be able to gain any qualifications from your tutoring, but you'll likely be helping them in their work to gain qualifications anyway.
This lack of formalities also means that you have more freedom in terms of what you teach and how you teach. Your tutoring might line up with the curriculum your students are studying elsewhere, but you won't have to teach exactly in line with it and you'll also have more freedom to include interesting and exciting activities and approaches into your sessions.
Being Your Own Boss
As a tutor, you can always work for a tutoring agency, but at the end of the day, you can choose whether you want to do this or go it alone. You already have the freedom to teach what and how you want, but you'll also enjoy being in charge of how your tutoring business works.
Between you and your students, you can pick the schedule, work the hours you want, and have more control over your own rates. Again, this will be affected by supply and demand so while you can set your own hours, you may have to be flexible and work the hours where you're most likely to find students.
Better Relationships with Your Students
As a tutor, you'll likely work with smaller classes or individuals. This means you'll form stronger bonds with your students and know what best works for them.
No matter how professional the relationship you have with your students is, you'll still be invested in their success. You're going to help them to achieve it, after all. All the hours of hard work you put in together are worth it when you see your students going on to become the next generation of nurses.
Find out more about why you should become a nursing tutor
Nursing Teacher Salary and Job Prospects
If you're thinking about becoming a nursing tutor rather than a nurse educator, you should know how much nursing teachers earn first.
I've already outlined the advantages of being a tutor over being a nursing teacher so now it's time to put see if a nursing teacher's salary is worth doing it.
Estimates put the salary at around $100k or between $44 and $50 per hour. Pay, like with most careers, goes up with experience and nurse educators with 5-10 years of experience tend to earn around 4% more than their junior counterparts.
Find out more about nurse educator jobs and prospects
What this all really means is that you need to weigh up what you'd prefer to do, how much you could earn being either a nursing teacher or tutor and which is ultimately best for you.
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