I successfully passed all three levels of CFA at my first attemps (scoring each time all topics on the +70% range). I am currently a PhD student in Economics and I am wondering whether I could maybe make a little bit of extra money by teaching CFA for CFA prep companies.
I looked at Schweser Kaplan website (because this was the books I used to prepare with) but I did not find any information about that (does not mean they don’t recruit it but they don’t seem to advertise for it). Do you know if some firms are recruiting tutors ? what are the firms the most likely to recruit ? I see a lot of different prep firms but I am wondering which one are important enough to recruit tutors so that I target them
I am currently located in Nice (South of France) and working between Nice and Paris. I think it is quite unlikely that some prep firms has physical teaching location in France (beside in Paris) so I am more looking for internet based teaching (or physical teaching in Paris if it can fit with my schedule). Do you know if there are tutors that work exclusively by internet (maybe answering student questions by e-mail) ? Is it hard to get recruited ?
Well any information about teaching CFA would be really appreciated !
The typical progression for teaching for the prep companies is to first spend s couple years teaching some of the face-to-face study sessions in a weekly program. Then, the folks that do consistently well get to to the intensive 2-3 day review sessions. From those, they end up doing the videos and online ones. At least, that’s what I hear from my colleagues who do it (I’ve been teaching CFA prep for about 6 years now). S2000 might have additional input.
You might be able to get them to let you teach a class in Nice if you think there is a market for it. You would likely be in charge of doing a lot of the marketing and promotion to get students in the class, but if you could do that, Schweser would likely be happy to make money from your students.
I took a Stalla prep class in a pretty small city, but the instructor could generate a consistent flow of students and Stalla trusted him.
teaching face to face study would be perfect for me. Is it face to face like physical face to face or through internet ? What would be a good strategy to contact the prep firms so that they hire me ? What are the “main” firms to target ? (I know Kaplan Schweser is quite a large one because everyone I knew was using them to study, but what are the main other ones ?)
Thx for your feedback, I struggle to really get an idea about whether there is a “market” or not. Could you maybe give me an idea about how large you city was so that I can compare ?
Bchad, you are correct about where I am from. I actually took the CFA prep class in Columbia, MO, which is much smaller. Population of 113,225 per Wikipedia - the 5th largest city in Missouri. Granted it has the college population so there are a relatively high number of people interested in taking the exam, but it is still a pretty small town.
Alas, not really. I stumbled into my first CFA teaching position because of an offhand comment from someone at a local university. For my second position, Stalla phoned the local CFA society, and three people told them to phone me. For my latest position, I e-mailed Andy Temte at Kaplan Schweser (when Stalla was going under); he had his people phone me the next day; they already knew who I was.
Congratulations on the great scores. Just out of curiosity, do you remember how you were doing at mock test scores for L2/L3?
On topic, I think you’ll hardly get a job to answer questions by e-mail or something “light” like that. I believe it is more common to the instructors themselves to answer the e-mails. I guess good bets would be to Google around “Nice” + “CFA” or stuff like that and see if anything pops up for live teaching. I guess that’s your best bet if you’re interested in something along these lines.
Asides from that, you should contact the biggest providers and see if they have any openings. You might even make a demo video to show them if requested. I don’t think that’s very likely to get you hired though - unless maybe they get impressed by a really stellar delivery.
You’re probably qualified to teach some subjects for other certifications and college/university courses, so you might take a look into that as well.
with the way that they report your score for level 3 you would pretty much need to get >70% for every single constructed response question in the morning and every item set in the afternoon.
Agreed. I was close to >70% in the afternoon for all sessions, but to get >70% in the morning sesssion is a feat that I imagine few have ever accomplished.
Internet teaching, from what i understand, is almost impossible for someone who has no previous teaching experience.
Think about it, Schweser only hire 3-4 instructors for each level and they are all experienced Schweser instructors prior to making the videos (that would be natural to do). And these videos are used WORLDWIDE.
If you are thinking other private/ smaller companies (perhaps french based), i don’t know how much $$ they can offer and if it’s worth your time. but you can certainly investigate.
Your best bet is live teaching if you want to be an instructor because they do hire a lot of people in major cities because live lectures make a lot of $$ for them!
Stalla had me teaching for them for a while. It’s enjoyable, but it’s a LOT of prep-work, even if you basically know the material. I’m NYC based, so I picked up a lot of the classes that Peter Olinto wasn’t available for or didn’t want to do (which tended to be Econ, some Quant, PM, and CorpFin).
They also had me going around pitching Stalla to college juniors and seniors. Those gigs didn’t pay as much as teaching did, but they took a lot less preparation time, since it was more or less the same 45 minute talk over and over again, rather than a 3 hour presentation where you had to be prepped for possibly difficult questions.
The companies also try to put so much info into a session that you can’t really teach it all that well, because you pretty much have to deliver all the content in the alloted time. At a university, you can say, “We’ll pick up where we left off next week,” and adjust your syllabus as you go on. With prep providers, you basically have to juggle clarity, thoroughness, and getting done on time, and more often than not, you have to make compromises on one or more or these.
It’s enjoyable, but it’s a lot more work than you’d think. Just because you know stuff doesn’t mean you can teach it well - so if you haven’t taught before in a classroom or lecture context, you may be in for a shock.