Pros
**I indicated I would recommend it to a friend because it is flexible with decent pay, and I know many people don't care about the many negatives I have listed.** Pros 1) The hours are very flexible, roughly 94.5 hours a week to choose from. 2) The location is also flexible, you just need 20mbps download and 10mbps upload, though through my own experience, MUCH lower speeds will still allow you to teach without issues. You need a low ping, mostly. 3) Certain teachers will easily fill their schedules. 4) Contracts, scheduling, and many other things are streamlined in the online platform. 5) Competitive salary. It's hard to find $18-$22 an hour for English teachers online, and the salary goes a long way if you live outside the US.
Cons
Cons 1) The hours are all evening to morning hours if you're in the US. 2) I'm upset at the amount of Chinglish I see. I see content far too often that includes common English learner mistakes, misleading or incorrect pictures, awkward sentences, non-grammatical structures, words and grammatical structures used incorrectly, and one time I saw a sentence that was clearly meant to be edited before publication, for example, "What did the doctor suggest Richard TO ?? do?" I feel that it's extremely unethical for a company with so much money and so many native English-speaking employees to be teaching this content to customers who trust them. 3) In opposition to #3 above, some people do NOT get as many hours as they'd like. I've seen reviews by people getting few classes after getting hired, or not even getting hired for reasons they were unsure about. From my experience with China, the culture is very racist and sexist, so I suspect this plays a role. Unfortunately this is at the customer's discretion, and not VIPKID's fault, but it is still a large negative. 4) If they change a policy, say the pay-raise policy, even your work before that will be assessed based on the new policy. 4b) As I understand it, their contract is extremely restrictive and over-reaching. "Company shall own all right, title and interest (including all intellectual property rights...) relating to any and all inventions, works of authorship, designs, know-how, ideas and information made or conceived or reduced to practice, in whole or in part, by or for or on behalf of Consultant during the term of this Agreement that relate to the subject matter of or arise out of or in connection with the Services or any Proprietary Information... Consultant also recognizes and agrees that Consultant has no expectation of privacy with respect to Company’s telecommunications, networking or information processing systems (including, without limitation, stored computer files, email messages and voice messages) and that Consultant’s activity, and any files or messages, on or using any of those systems may be monitored at any time without notice... Consultant hereby grants Company and its successors a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable right and license to exploit and exercise all such technology and intellectual property rights... without any further compensation, Company may and is hereby authorized to (and to allow others to) use Consultant’s name and group photographs, video and/or audio recordings documenting Consultant..." On our message boards, it appears some teachers got really embarrassed when VIPKID started putting "example classes" up for teachers to review. 5) If you live in the US, the salary doesn't go too far. It's exhausting to try to teach many hours. If you think about school teachers, I don't think any teacher has more than 30 hours a week of face-to-face time with students, so it's not very realistic to think you can work "full time," even though VIPKID explicitly calls it a part time job. You must also keep track of your own taxes. 5b) I also think it's unethical to pay teachers $9 to $11 per half-hour class when the customers pay over $40 USD (288 CNY) per half-hour class. This price likely makes VIPKID only accessible by the extremely wealthy, and I would assume that the teachers got paid much more if I were a customer. 6) I feel that the company is intentionally minimal with their communication, only telling you the information that might help you once it's too late. I've read about VIPKID apparently not counting some days off because of internet outages - which were all of my "sick days" during my first year - but I had no idea, and lost a good amount of money because of their cancellation policy. They did not tell me in the lengthy hiring process that I could only get a pay raise once a year. 7) They claim to have tens of thousands of teachers, and I feel like nobody to them. 8) All of their employees do a great job of learning English, but that doesn't change the fact that it can be very difficult at times to communicate with the company. 9) I couldn't take many of the teacher trainings because I had one (1) sick day almost 2 months prior (but technically in the "last pay period"). 10) I have tried to bring up these problems with VIPKid and have frequently been met with non-answers, generic answers, or the message that they are waiting on another team to respond and then no answers for weeks.
