Cambly

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• NO PAY INCREASE FOR 9 YEARS.

  Let that sink in.

  Kevin Law and Sameer Shariff are the Cambly founders.

  Do they care about low pay?

  NOPE.

• I've taught there for a few years. It's ok if you have the right students. Time will just fly by in that situation. It's bad if you get demading students who expect to talk like a native English speaker in a month or students who only know five English words. Time will just drage on. It's best if you have regulars at a high English level who just want to free talk. Right now there seems to be too many tutors so my hours went WAY down. That's why I'm on this website. haha.

  Your score is very important on Cambly because that's how you get priority hours. They're referred to as "PHs". Teachers on a PH get first dibs on students waiting for a tutor. Without priority hours, you won't find many students. You must get a 5 from each student. If you get a 4, it'll really hurt your score. With all the new tutors on Cambly, it's super important to maintain a score close to a 5. Be careful with some regular students though. They might actually give you a 4 each time thinking they are giving you a good score.

  The best thing is Cambly pays every week on time. The pay is on the low end though.

  • This company seems to have gone down-hill rapidly. The number of students may well have declined, apparently subscription charges have been increased. There seems to be a massive disconnect between what students think they are buying and what tutors think they are engaged to provide. Many students have utterly unrealistic expectations, presumably fostered by ridiculous advertising statements. However, the tutor rating system has become yet more murky and feels most unfair. Work is offered according to rating so many tutors now find themselves with insufficient work - as already said, hence browsing this site. The pay rate, which has not been increased since the inception of the company, is now too low even for tutors living in developing countries. Many decent tutors have left for pastures new. Also some of the new or revised lesson materials could have been written by a primary school pupil. One has to assume that the owners only care about profit and plan to push this business until it goes the way of many other former esl platforms.

• I am a Cambly tutor, and I have had nothing but excellent experiences in this posotion both with the company and with the students. I am happy to elaborate further for anyone interested in teaching or learning from Cambly. As a former university professor, I recommend Cambly at the highest level.

  • You spent all that money on obtaining 'Professor' status and work for $10 an hour?

  • I saw the good statement you mentioned about Cambly
    Would you perhaps remember how long it took for Camnly to accept your profile after your application was done

• I had a terrible experience teaching at Cambly. I had a "student" one day who was very strange, I could definitely tell something was off about him. He was testing me and acting really odd. So at the end of the lesson he starts laughing at me and tells me he is one of the founders or CEOs of the company (which upon my research he actually was) and that he wanted to test me. He laughed at me and thought all his rediculous behaviour during the class was hilarious. I got an email the next day saying he posted the whole class on a social media site in china and that it was getting lots of views. I never gave permission and really felt embarrassed. I never went back. I was shocked how unprofessional he was.

  • ...If it's longer than a month since you sent your application, Cambly probably didn't accept you. I have had the best and worst possible online experiences on Cambly. It's a bit of a rodeo without many regulars I concluded.

    So get students you want to teach and commit time specifically for them, if you have that kind of time lying around! Don't stress too much if your rating is 4.8 plus. If you have respectful students they will help you out and hopefully give you the testimonials you'd like. I would, however, give them a week or two of getting to know you before I express that a testimonial and optimal rating would be greatly appreciated!

    Express in your profile what you're especially interested in- action movies, video games, travel or psychology, examination prep, grammar, business English.... any keywords can help you get detected by potential regulars!
    I sometimes hate being the virtual Uber driver of English... I think Uber is more fair though. Nevermind the odd senseless mishaps with Cambly's less than perfect system. I may as well try other platforms too, instead of finding myself in some chaos of random English students popping up, some like strange sprites summoned off a ouija board.

    For those awkward moments with tricky classes, this site has helped other tutors-
    https://printdiscuss.com/

    A student told me that talking and enabling someone to express themselves is a human need and tutoring is worthy. It's my only inspiration to do it sometimes.

• Does anyone out there currently work for Cambly? Most of the posts on here are very old. I applied to Cambly about 2 months ago. When I check my application status it still says: "Your profile is being reviewed." Yes, I sent Cambly an email to ask about my status. Just wanted to see if anyone else waited a long time to hear from them? Thank goodness I am not really in need of an online job....If anyone has any information - Thank You!

  • I do currently work for Cambly. I love it very flexible. I love working with the kids. I do tutor adults from time to time.

• I have been working for Cambly for about a year and a half. Different people with different experiences. I had a good experience as a SIDE JOB. The pay is low but that's why you need to put this job as a side earning. I work mainly for another teaching company.

  -The pay is low
  -Students from Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Brazil.
  -Flexible hours
  -They are adding more courses and material which is nice because a lot of the students want you to evaluate them and give them courses from your own material so I had to prep for classes and for the money they pay it ain't worth it. Some students just want to have a conversation. You have priority hours which is good to make some extra cash during the holidays and they have reservation classes that students reserve from your performance on priority hours.
  -This company can be good to gain experience and earn some extra cash.
  -I stopped working for about 3 months and came back as nothing happened. They keep your account open even if you stop working for a while.
  -They pay every Monday. Yes, Every Week and on time.

  Overall, I believe the company is a good way to gain experience teaching and can serve as extra cash for a vacation or anything else. Don't expect to earn much but the company is pretty lay-back with cancellations and etc. It does have its pros and cons but if you are doing it for some extra cash or part-time then it has more pros than cons.

  I hope this helps a bit towards an update to this company for 2021

  By the way, thanks to goodairlanguage for helping me find a teaching job and get my teaching career started. I got all my information from here for all 3 companies I have worked for. I still work for 2 out of the 3 companies.

• This is what Cambly send to all of the students you have that have boked up to 3 weeks in advance:

  "Unfortunately, your teacher canceled the session Thursday, December 03, 2020, 04:00 AM (Asia / Riyadh) for special circumstances. We apologize for what happened and inform you that your minutes have been fully refunded."

  They don't send the once either, they send it every time they have booked in advance. I had one student received this message 14 times, leaving the student feeling upset, like that had offended me and I had gotten rid of the student. (I wouldn't have spelt "cancelled" they way they did, or "apologise" with a 'z' it was the only thing that gave it away it wasn't me.)

  The fired me when I was on a break with this email:

  "Hello Mr Russ,

  Thank you for your participation with Cambly. We've really appreciated you taking an interest in our platform and speaking to Cambly students.

  We are informing you that your tutor account has been deactivated from our system and the remaining balance will be paid to your PayPal account during the next cycle.

  We would like to thank you for your time with us. We wholeheartedly wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

  Sincerely,
  The Cambly Team"

  Lovely little piece of literature isn't it. Unlike others I have read here I know the reason:

  One new customer asked me "Hey Mr Russ, do you know anything about property buying in Australia" He was from Saudi Arabia. I said yep just check "LinkedIn - Russ Tuff" then I went on with the next lesson. In the gap of the next lesson i read his response "Great I will contact you shortly"

  Then I get this email stating this is against the policies of Cambly... blah blah blah. Yeah... but it was getting business for Cambly, and I have at least 20 students on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, my TikTok account... so what, they like to be part of their teachers lives.

  They threatened me with sacking me...

  Here is exactly what a woman called Ari sent me: "If the disparaging language continues then we reserve the right to deactivate your account." I said "Do it"

  They cant take any criticism and see it as a an opportunity to rectify a situation.

  I have four reasons to NEVER EVER work with Cambly.

  1. The rarely if at all answer your teacher queries.
  2. The platform has bugs all through it, although it is getting better. I stopped letting them know because I would get an automated message after a week saying "How did we go answering your email" to which I would reply "You didn't answer it" and still didn't get a reply.
  3. Occasionally I spotted I had been ripped off in my pay. like a 45 minute lesson and I only got paid 15 minutes. I have to bring it to their attention, and then they send out a standard email that says:

  "Sorry that call's Chat Length was counted incorrectly!
  Incorrect Chat Lengths do happen sometimes - usually caused by a poor student (or tutor) connection or because the tutor has Cambly open in more than one tab - and 99% of the time those chats are automatically flagged by our system and then, manually looked at and corrected by us. If one ever hasn't been adjusted after two working days, it could be one of the 1% not caught by the system and in that case, please just reply to this message (again, only if it hasn't been corrected after a few days) and we'll investigate it for you :)
  Also, if you find you were released from a PH due to an incorrect Chat Length, you can respond to this email and we will be sure to make any necessary amendments.
  There normally isn't any need to reply to this message, but if you are forced to, as mentioned above, please do include the student's ID and exact date & time of the call in question
  Hope that helps and all the best!"

  I got this message twice in two weeks.... 1% my arse.

  so.... they'll rip you off, they treat you badly, they don't listen, they threaten you with being sacked if you cause trouble, when they do sack you they tell all your students you cancelled the students, they are the lowest pay I have found yet.... why would you work for them?

  They have ONE really good thing about them... just one. The pay goes in the bank every Monday night via PayPal without fail. I never had to chase that up. Just the amount I was being paid.

  Just so you know... this review is done with nearly 2000 lesson for Cambly and nearly different 800 students. I am glad to have been given the boot by them. There are so many better places to go to. You don't need this place.

• I am a 16 year old girl from Australia. Do you have to say your age on cambly? Is it easy to get into the Kids program? How easy is it to cancel a call, and what if you get a call from someone who seems off? How are the security measurements? If i were to do reservations, could i control who can reserve?

• Cambly are CRAP....You have to put up with Men Masturbating in front of you..Some students who are on the site do not even want to learn English and can not even speak English at the lowest level. I was fired after 1 year because they said some students had told them they did not like the way I taught them..LOL..So why book classes with me if you do not like the way I teach.. They are just interested in making $$ and do not help the Tutors with any problems. If someone cancels a class a second before they are suppose to start you will NOT get paid a cent. CRAP COMPANY....Do not bother with them.

• I enjoyed working for Cambly and had excellent feedback rating and guess what? I got an email this morning stating that my account was being deactivated. I feel very upset as I had a number of sessions arranged today with regular students. They will be messaging me and waiting for me to come online. I suggest that Cambly should at least give tutors time to inform regular learners before the deactivate accounts and also an opportunity for tutors to discuss problems with students in order to help to resolve issues. As, we live in a world where we talk and discuss and try to resolve issues and as teachers/tutors we encourage students to talk and discuss and resolve issues and not to take one side or view.