Peer tutoring is more than just an effective method of learning for the student getting tutored; it is also an incredibly beneficial experience for the student doing the tutoring. Being a peer tutor provides a truly unique opportunity to gain valuable skills that will be useful in all future work. As such, successful peer tutors exhibit and further develop the exact same skill sets that every hiring manager is looking for in a potential employee.
Success as a peer tutor is, most simplistically, dependent on the ability to attract new clients and retain existing ones. Getting a client to come back for additional sessions is a reflection of not only the tutor’s knowledge of the subject matter but also the overall experience of the session.
Some of the most important drivers of success as a peer tutor are:
- Knowledge — If you don’t know your stuff, people won’t pay you to help them learn.
- Dependability — Students must be able to depend on you for them to keep coming back.
- Positive Attitude — No one will keep paying for help from someone who is unpleasant to be around.
- Effective Communication — Knowing something and knowing how to communicate it are two different things.
- Organization — Balancing tutoring responsibilities with a busy schedule is no easy task.
- Ability to Work Under Pressure — There’s nowhere to hide as a peer tutor; you have to be able to operate on the fly and make quick decisions to run a smooth session.
- Confidence — Anyone who wants fellow college students to pay them for help must be very confident in their abilities.
- Unselfishness/Teamwork — Successful tutors put their students first; the ability to do this translates extremely well into being team-oriented in the workplace.
Why is this important?
When hiring recent college graduates, it is difficult to differentiate between applicants with similar resumes (i.e. solid GPA, campus involvement, internship and work experience, etc…). Anyone who is intelligent and works hard enough will be able to graduate with a good GPA, but not just anyone will be able to succeed as a peer tutor. It takes a special type of person to build and maintain a successful tutoring business, especially when serving clients at the college level.
Comparing the above list of what it takes to be successful as a peer tutor with the top skills hiring managers are looking for in a potential employee, it is clear that successful tutors and great employees are one in the same. The question then becomes: What qualifies a tutor as successful? And, furthermore: How can we identify the best of the best?
Unlocking The Power of Knack
Luckily, we have the ability to measure how tutors stack up with both soft skills and hard knowledge through capturing their tutoring interactions on the Knack platform. With thousands of students using the platform every day, we can easily summarize and contextualize the performance of individual tutors based on their overall production levels, their effort towards recruiting new students, and the feedback provided to us by the students they work with.
With all of this valuable data, and our proprietary methods of assessment, we can construct a complete picture of how each and every tutor on our platform compares to one another, and identify the tutors who will become the best possible employees for your company.