Register as a Tutor | Tutor Login

About Us - Smart Tuition Singapore

Our tuition agency is a registered business in Singapore. We mainly help parents and students to find suitable private home tutors.

We are a team of happy folks who are trying to help people who are appreciative. Not everyone in the team is working full-time but every coordinator takes up his/her own comfortable number of tuition assignments to handle at any given time - we don't wish to overload anyone. Most of the coordinators are doing the team a favour by helping out, which means that they have been putting in more effort than any normal worker who works simply for the sake of money. All of them have also been placing the company's interest before self. Although we don't generate high income, our friendship and enthusiasm keeps us going.

We are short of manpower most of the time, especially for tuition coordinators. This is not due to any tightening of foreign labours. As we are dealing with sensitive information of many people, we are recruiting mainly friends and relatives whom we can trust. Fortunately, we receive job requests frequently from people who want to take up coordinator job even though we have been frank that tuition coordinators do not earn a lot, unlike full-time tutors.

While tuition is a big market in Singapore because education is extremely competitive, the market for tuition agencies is highly saturated and faces lots of unforeseeable problems. Due to the nature of the business that operates mainly via online and phone, more people are showing their dark side for they think they are kind of anonymous (the reason why we tend to be more demanding over certain stuffs, such as document verification). Even tutors are unaware of the difficulties in running a decent tuition agency business, and thus we do face problems with some of them.

There are many tuition agencies that simply "rent" their databases of home tutors to tuition coordinators who will pay them monthly rental fees. Smart Tuition operates differently by managing our own team of tuition coordinators to help parents, students and home tutors who approach us directly.

For those who are interested to know more about who you are working with, do read on. You may also be interested in why parents and students choose us.

How do We Work?

Prioritizing clients, tutors and tasks

Our main priority is our clients. The ratio of tutors to clients are far too high for us to find clients exclusively for any tutor. Therefore, our coordinators are instructed to only answer calls from clients and also tutors who are successfully matched with the clients. Since we also have a large number of sincere clients who are waiting for our help to find their ideal tutors, we prioritize them over clients who seem to be mass emailing different tuition agencies at the same time.

We take pride in improving our website but there are too many features and improvements to be made in order to help our coordinators, parents/students, tutors and visitors. Most importantly, we need to help our coordinators to work more efficiently and feel comfortable to stay in the team. Every new feature takes time to be implemented. Therefore, we have to prioritize on the more important items.

For example, the feature for tutors to remove their accounts by themselves was implemented only during the second year of operation. This was due to prioritizing of existing tutors over tutors who had given up tutoring. Of course, when we were short of the feature, we did face problem of having to do manual work whenever we received any such request from the ex-tutors. Unfortunately, even after the feature is pushed to live, we occasionally continue to receive emails from some ex tutors who don't bother to do it on their own. We are glad to have them removed but we don't have the time to reply to acknowledge.

For daily administration work, we prioritize in document verification to ensure tutors are verified and can take up tuition assignments ASAP. Frequently, we do receive enquiries from tutors that have already been answered on our FAQ page, and we may not be able to reply to every email.

In short, we are prioritizing existing tutors over those who are quiting. We are also prioritizing tutors who bother to read and follow instruction, over those who make less effort.

Reducing stress for coordinators for better work

We do not demand or pressure any coordinator to take up any number of tuition assignments. All coordinators determine their own amount of workload that they can handle at any point of time. This will not add stress to their lives, so that they can give in their best in handling all the tuition assignments they have chosen to take up. The logic is simple - when you are too heavily loaded with work, you will not be able to maintain your usual standard of work.

We understand that some tuition agencies will let their coordinators handle same tuition assignments to race against each other. However, we believe we can find more suitable tutors for clients by spending more effort, which also means taking up more time. Moreover, keen tutors will need time to check through our assignments list before applying for them. Nevertheless, we do not want any coordinator to waste his/her time and effort just because a team-mate is lucky enough to find a match (may not be the best match though) faster. Lastly, it is very bothersome to clients having different tuition coordinators to contact him or her.

Screening of tutors

There is no fool-proof way to judge the tutors. However, we do our best in every way to eliminate the black sheep. We also find out about the attitude of tutors through all interactions, including how they fill up the registration form, submit their documents for verification and communicate with us via phone, email or text. From there, we can easily judge who are the ones who will bother to follow simple instructions and who are the ones who have things to hide. We also share experiences and feedback from clients regarding the tutors in our system.

Integrity and hard work

We do not push tutors to clients just to close the tuition assignments. Every recommendation follows a tedious work from filtering of tutors in our database to interviewing of them via phone, email or text.

What we cannot do

  1. Promising 100% suitable match
  2. Eliminating black sheep totally
  3. Finding student exclusively for a tutor
  4. Preventing typographic errors
  5. Replying to all "enquiries"
  6. Giving instruction to search engine companies
  7. Educating everyone on everything

Job Roles


No, we are not going to reveal how some of us are multi-tasking. Basically, it is very interesting how people of same mindsets and different skillsets can come together to form a team.

Active Team-mates

We may not be able to update this section frequently. Not everyone is comfortable to be featured here due to work commitment - we respect their privacy.

Mr Ong

Mr Ong is a graduate from SMU, majoring in accountancy. His friendly disposition has allowed him to be exceptionally suitable for this job. Being a tutor himself, he has always made a point to relate to the parents from experience. He takes pride in guiding his students and does preparation work for every lesson, so that his students' grades can improve tremendously. With very good time management skill, he has managed to juggle between study and work, and not forgetting his hobby - singing.

With an exceptionally strong vocal, he has emerged the champion in one of the inter-tertiary school competitions in year 2009 and top 5 finalists in Sunsilk Academy Fantasia competition in year 2012. If you have caught The Final One or Super Idol 8 (Taiwan), you will understand why he is very well-liked. He believes that if there is will, there is a way.

Mr Ong is actually the silent angel of our home tutors. He has been increasing rating and adding good feedback on tutors.

Skai

Skai is a graduate of University of Wollongong, majoring in Information Technology. He is the administrator and web producer in the team. He has dedicated over two years of his life working with great heroes in ITE College West (Clementi Campus) to help the students to build up their confidence and find meaning in their lives before moving on to his passion - web-building. His forte are web designing, web programming, copy-writing and internet marketing.

He loves interacting with kind people and can never get used to formalities (probably jokes too much to be a lecturer); on the other hand, he shows great respect to others. He is someone who lives by his principles and is detailed to little things, although these do wear him out at times. He helps a lot in the initial assessment of tutors through their registration and document verification.

Skai is also a freelance photographer who does portraiture, event and interior shoot for clients who appreciate his work.

Tricia

Tricia is an ex commercial make-up artist who has given up her passion for the sake of her three cute children. She finds the tuition coordinating work very meaningful because she gets to help many people; moreover, she loves interacting with people. The flexibility of the work and our outgoing team-mates allow her to persist on despite the hardship and little monies reward. Tricia is very detailed, committed and stubborn in a good way that she can spend many hours to work on tuition assignments that are less beneficial. She also has very high EQ, such that she is able to work well with most clients and tutors who are sincere. Some parents specifically request her for help.

Beneath her strong front and great exposure in life, she is extremely emotional and sensitive. She has given up lots of good career opportunities for the sake of Smart Tuition and her kids. She has also been turning down high paying hair and makeup jobs due to lack of time.




Other Team-mates

Anessa
Rozana
Kai

Inactive Team-mates

Some of our team-mates have moved on to pursue their own interest and are no longer in our team. We are still grateful to them regardless of the duration they have been with us.

Amanda, Angel, Brandon, Candy, Charmaine, Chloe, Clarence, Darrel, Darren, Daryl, Delvin, Derrick, Frederick, Gaistri, Gavin, Greg, Jane, Jay, Jeffery, Jessica, Kaidi, Kimberly, Lorraine, Martina, Myrren, Nazia, Pei Shing, Phei San, Philip, Richard Rose, Samantha, Sharon, Simin, Sophie, Tracy, Victoria, Wai Ling, Weiping, Weiwen, Yilin, Yu Chong,

Thank you!



You may also be interested in:
- Our Tuition Agency






Like this page? Share with your friends! Please link us in your website/blog!



"Education can no longer be the sole property of the state." - Peter F. Drucker


Students' Stationery

Singapore Guides

Tuition Articles & Guides

Smart Tuition Tutor Guides