51Talk

My sister works with this company. Unfortunately, she got sick and obviously, she can't attend to her classes. However, she was told that she can't be out for her entire class or else she will be fired! A sick teacher talking to your students, looking awful - and yet you expect then to be jolly, finish their entire shift and deprive them from rest?! No wonder this company has very low credibility. Bull$#*! policies! They dont even deserve a one star rating!

When I first started 3 years ago, they offered pay advancement and a supportive staff. This year they actually decreased teachers' pay. They do offer incentive bonuses if certain criteria are met. (You cannot be late, absent, have a complaint.) A little insane criteria, but worth a try. There software caused me to be one minute late in May. After weeks of fighting to prove that it was their software which caused the late tag, they finally agreed to pay my the incentive bonus I earned. It was to be paid late however, included in my June pay out. I was reassured by various sources that it was set to be included. I didn't completely trust this and a few days before pay day rechecked to make sure everything was in line. Now they tell me it will be withheld. Dirty. Dirty. Dirty company. Doing everything and anything not to pay teachers the money they earn.

I got excellent reviews from my students, but my Evaluator gave me a zero. Also, they claimed I had absences which would cost me P1,000 for one week's hard work. I was not absent a single day and I had screenshots to help my case. If you work here, take screenshots of EVERYTHING. But I think you should just move on. They make you do free lessons supposedly for promotions. They only tell you that after you are launched. Also, the pay is really low. If you are gonna be exploited, do it for more money, because there will be many reasons that they will try to make you less valuable. I think students are the prime raters and the consistency of my five star rates from my students are more valuable to me than that of a hired Evaluator who may have an agenda. Just saying.

Had my interview on the 6th of April and a group Skype chat after a week to be given very basic instructions on their photo requirements and to be sent an Induction Manual (lasted 3 mins completely pointless at 2 o'clock in the morning). I am still waiting since the 4th of May after I provided them with a qualifying photo and voice recording to be scheduled an induction training. I can no longer see my trainer online on Skype and she is no longer responding to my messages. Extremely unprofessional I was referred by I friend, which she ended having a lot of issues with them as well.

My mum is a workaholic one, she is very conscious about her performance. She worked there for a month and decided to quit since this filthy company banned her for having 3 absences. It is when super typhoon ulysses hit our town so sometimes our wifi becomes unstable. There is no consideration for it. And the penalty fee she worked for for a month is gone, plus she still have to pay 51 talk for her remaining penalty fee. There are many circumstances which shows how unfair this company is.

It's making me angry, how they treat and pay teachers is not justifiable. Please, dont waste your time like my mum.

I worked as a teacher for 51talk. With students able to book lessons 1/2 hour before they commence with NO NOTIFICATION sent to teachers it is a totally unworkable situation. And top it off with US$16 penalties if 1 second late for a lesson which only gives you US$7.50 you can continually owe more money than you make. Everything is setup for 51talk to extract fees and penalties from teachers.

Wake up 51talk and create notifications for teachers... It is ridiculous the systems you have in place for any teacher to plan their day and have productivity.

1. They impose 200 peso penalties for absences, even when you've been absent, not because of your fault, but because of their lousy and terrible system. They are treating their teachers as robots and NOT as human beings! Sometimes, I feel like they are doing it on purpose just to get more money from the teachers through penalties.
2. When you make an appeal regarding those penalties, the process will take soo many days and a LOT of back and forth from the so-called "support" team. The submission of the appeal is also designed so that it will take TOO much effort and TOO much time. Even the uploading of screenshots should be done one by one on a different website! So you end up being annoyed or just losing all the willpower to get your 200 peso penalty (which has become more than 1000 pesos for me now and I have only been working for 4 days here - YES that's how terrible it is)
2. Some of the kids are not nice. Others are rude and not listening
3. The support system is terrible. They only give you an "illusion" of having a support team but they are RARELY helpful. I loathe this system.

If you want to work for someone with a management style straight out of the 1950's this is the place. No questions are every answered. All decisions are made in China. Procedures are not tested. We do this as a standard practice no need to test for a new use. Examples of how software should work are not provided. The teacher is told the set up the first time. But for only one case among several. If something doesn't work it must be your fault and you should spend your time working it out with tech support. (This is only a problem as they never tested to see if the procedure would work.) Company uses three different interfaces to students with varying levels of quality. They are doing you a favor to let you work for them. Business policy makes no sense. They raised the rates 33% for native language teachers which resulted in a 70 to 100% loss of bookings for teachers.

This company demoralizes you because they work on a double standard. Whatever, students say is taken as gospel even if the teacher has screenshots to prove otherwise. The student can evaluate the teacher as having a bad internet connection without providing a screenshot of their own connection speed. These student evaluations affect the teacher's service score. Students usually choose teachers with high service scores. 51Talk often wants you to rate new students but if you score a student low and they get upset and give the class a low evaluation 51Talk will not defend you. Of course penalties against you are lightning quick. Count your classes to make sure you are being paid properly because classes are often missed in the company's favour.

The people, such as the recruiter and the trainers that I dealt with face-to-face were helpful, competent and friendly. The teaching was great and I had pages of 'excellent' student evaluations.

The day to day experience of deailing with the company outside of that was painful. There were endless tech and admin issues requiring disproportionate time and energy to deal with.

The real problems were the growing number of issues that, at first appeared to be glitches, or oversights but then were clearly signs of a business operating in bad faith.

Goal posts changed for promotions, required training - for promotion- became inaccessible (no bookings available for weeks and then when I booked in the trainer was not given my correct details and did not include me); hours trying to sort out payment in a timely fashion - within the standard pay cycle, which I thought was organised but I still have not received a transfer for well over 100 lessons. Slots automatically filled for Free Classes that I did open (I knew before I started I was away on these days) and then being told I would be billed penalties for these classes.

The students were great. The basic administration was hopeless and the policies reflected a complete lack of awareness of the distinction between employee and contractor as well as requirements of doing business in a global context today. Most of all though: payment. Work somewhere else if you want to get paid.

They are just good at getting new recruits(teachers or tutors-to-be) but if you are already a part of the organization, everything is a scam! They do not consider any proof of errors of their system, like when their chat system is down and it's hard for a teacher to be able to log in, every screen shots, proofs that there was an error will not be accepted and you'll have to pay for it even if it's the system's fault. You will not earn here, maniac, stupid and disrespectful Chinese students can't even be reported for their negative attitudes. Penalties are unimaginably fair, for PHP50 per hour if you miss a class or if a student just decided to mark you absent even if you're not it will automatically be a penalty for an amount of PHP300 per class. This is not a good company to work at not even close to bad but perfectly worst than any company I've heard.

To know an in-depth review of 51talk, please visit this page Https :// www.facebook.com/51talk-Philippines-Stay-away-from-51talk**************

Basically, this company likes to use cheap gimmicks like bloated earning figures to attract applicants even if a starting teacher only earns P50 per class/lesson/student. While max earnings is only P66 per lesson/class/student not to mention it is a booking system - you have no control on who will book your class.

The company earns money off of the teacher by way of inhumane deductions from penalties on uncontrollable situations like power outages, internet problem, sickness and emergencies. The deduction are from P250-P300 per missed lesson/class/student. If you have 5 booked lessons then it's going to cost you big time. To add insult to injury, they would promise, during your on-boarding, to waive your penalties upon the presentation of a proof. But once you start your tenure, it is no longer the case.

There are a whole lot more infos in the link I posted above.

There no perfect company but 51talk is beyond imperfect but more on being shady and pathetic. Always remember that nobody in their right mind to write negative reviews about a company if there are none and a good/decent company will always speak for itself and doesn't need cheap gimmicks.

This company has an entire department devoted to flagging and fining it's teachers. Basically, they work overtime taking their money from you! If you complain, they punish you by cancelling your classes and giving thenm to someone else especially those on the Free Trial team! It is so mean, what they do! My morale went throught the floor and I absolutely LOVE to teach and I am very good at it. Shame on 51talk. By the way, they have so many bad reviews, they have tried to change their name to TWOSIGMAS, same company. Be careful!

The training is stupid, and the trainers can't even speak english properly. I don't know how these "trainers" gained experience teaching english when they can't speak it themselves.
You are not guaranteed a job and you can git fired in the so called "training". The final two sessions before the test are not training. You can lose your job there. The give some applicants chances to improve after they have given advice and re-do it. But I didn't get a chance. Due to this I was NOT PAID for the hours of time I wasted on this. DO NOT ASSUME YOU WILL BE PAID FOR THE TRAINING! My trainer was rude, and unresponsive to my mock lessons which made it difficult. The other teacher she helped and let re-do her slides (so inappropriate and unfair) did the same thing. I made sure to not respond to her mock class.

They want you to get the kids to memorize english and play stupid little games. THIS IS NOT LEARNING ENGLISH. I feel sorry for the families relying on this company to teach their kids.

Do not waste a second of your time on this pathetic company where they treat professional with advanced degrees that are native speakers so poorly. There is no time for this if you are actually INTERESTED IN IMPROVING YOUR TEACHING SKILLS. You area robot thats just meant to read a nonsensical script and play stupid games.

Recently 51talk has gotten a new endorser, former Miss Universe Pia Wurtzbach, to promote the online teaching site in the Philippines.
Needless to say, this move has gotten a lot of interested applicants. Do not be fooled! This is an unfair company.

Aside from their super unfair teaching rate and false advertising, they will never hear out teacher appeals on our negative feedbacks and they will cite bull$#*! reasons as to why they should sanction you for the feedback you got when you rebutted the comment correctly.

Most of the time, the parents give out negative feedback if their children get low grades even though it is completely justified. The company will not hear you out again when you appeal to this.

They also deduct fees against you when you encounter difficulties attending a lesson arising from natural disasters or uncontrollable circumstances, like power outages and internet interruptions. They also will force you to open a lot of slots per cut off even if you stated you are a PART TIME teacher.

No alerts for booked classes. Also, students are allowed to book you for lessons 2mins in the lesson slot time. To top it off, their crappy website wouldn't allow you to close a slot 1min before the actual start time to avoid this instance. (Pro tip: Use their crappy phone app to cancel)

I am only sticking it out with them because of my regular students, but as for their management and treatment of employees? You're better off finding other online ESL tutorial services with better policies to protect your $#*! and interests.

PS. Currently on the process of getting onboarded to a different company now. Best of luck if you decide to apply or stick with 51talk. Adios!