How to Apply to Novakid: Requirements, Process and What It Pays

How do you apply to Novakid as an English teacher?

You apply to Novakid through its own recruitment site, where the posted Online ESL Teacher role asks for C1 English, a high school diploma, an international teaching certificate such as TEFL, TESOL or TEYL, and at least six months teaching English to children. Pay is stated only as compensation based on completed lessons.

Key takeaways

• Novakid is one of the stricter young learner platforms. Unlike Cambly and Preply, it will not take you without a certificate and without prior experience teaching children.
• The experience bar is specific and easy to miss: at least six months teaching English to children, not six months teaching in general.
• Novakid does not publish a rate. Its own listing says only that compensation is based on completed lessons, so any hourly figure you see online comes from a teacher, not from the company.
• The application is document heavy. Identity papers, citizenship and residence evidence, your degree or diploma and a short video introduction are all collected in one form.
• Novakid states that teachers from 56 countries are already on its team, and its listing names no nationality requirement.
• Because the certificate is checked rather than assumed, a qualification an employer can verify independently is worth more here than one that cannot be looked up.

Most guides to online teaching platforms are written for people who want the easiest door. This one is about a harder door, and the reason it is worth knowing about is that fewer people get through it. Novakid asks for things Cambly and Preply do not, which means the pool of applicants is smaller and the teachers who qualify are competing with fewer people.

What follows is taken from Novakid’s own recruitment listing and checked on the day of writing, alongside the published positions of three platforms it is usually compared with. Where a figure is not published, this guide says so rather than filling the gap.

What does Novakid require from teachers?

Six things, and two of them are the ones that catch people out. The certificate and the children specific experience are both screened, and the listing is explicit that a general teaching background is not the same thing.

How to cite this table. The TEFL Institute, “How to Apply to Novakid: Requirements, Process and What It Pays”, teflinstitute.com, requirements checked 21 September 2026 against Novakid’s own Online ESL Teacher listing. Platforms change entry rules without notice, so verify against the company’s own page before applying.

What does Novakid pay?

Novakid does not say. Its listing states that compensation is based on completed lessons and puts no number beside it, so there is no published rate to quote and this guide will not invent one.

That is worth taking seriously rather than treating as an oversight. When a platform publishes a rate, as Cambly does, you can compare before you apply. When it does not, the only figures available come from teachers posting on social media, and those figures vary by market, by hours worked and by how long the teacher has been on the platform. They are worth reading as impressions and worthless as a budget.

The practical move is to complete the process far enough to be told your own rate, and to treat that number, not a video, as the thing you decide on. Ask specifically what a cancelled or no show lesson pays, because on lesson based compensation that question decides a surprising share of your monthly income.

How does Novakid compare with the platforms people weigh it against?

Novakid sits at the strict end. The table below puts its published position beside three platforms it is routinely compared with, using each company’s own wording rather than recruiter summaries.

That pattern is not confined to these four. Our Hire Wire briefing checked eight online teaching platforms against their own pages and found that only one of them publishes what online English teaching platforms actually pay, with three publishing a commission percentage instead and four publishing nothing at all. The online English teaching pay rates by platform desk keeps those published rates and commissions current and converts them to euro.

Read that table as a trade. The platforms with no entry requirements publish low fixed rates and put you in a large pool. Novakid asks for a certificate and for children specific experience, and in exchange you are applying against fewer people, but you go in without knowing the number.

If you want the wider comparison first, our guide to the best platforms to teach English online covers adult, business and exam work alongside young learner teaching, and our guide to online English teaching jobs sets out who hires, what they pay and what they ask for. For the two platforms in the table above that we cover in depth, see our Cambly review and our guide to teaching English online with NativeCamp.

What does the Novakid application actually involve?

More paperwork than most platforms, collected in a single form rather than spread across stages. Knowing the list in advance is the difference between a twenty minute application and an abandoned one.

1. Contact details. Personal email address, phone number and country of residence.
2. Photograph. Uploaded as PNG, JPG or JPEG.
3. CV. Uploaded as PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPEG or PNG.
4. Legal name. Exactly as it appears on your identity document or passport.
5. Identity verification. Supporting documents uploaded directly.
6. Citizenship and residence. Stated, with supporting documents.
7. Date of birth.
8. Educational qualification. Your degree or diploma, uploaded.
9. Teaching certificates. Marked optional at upload, although the role listing states a certificate is required, so upload it.
10. Teaching experience questions. This is where the six months with children is tested.
11. Video introduction. Thirty to sixty seconds.
12. Consent. Legal terms and data processing.

Two of those deserve preparation rather than improvisation. The video introduction is short enough that a rambling start wastes a third of it, so lead with who you teach and what you are qualified in. And step nine is a trap of wording rather than intent: the upload field is optional, the job is not, and an application without the certificate attached is an application that has to be chased.

Does Novakid hire teachers outside the usual countries?

Its recruitment site states that “ESL teachers from 56 countries are already part of our team”, and the Online ESL Teacher listing names no nationality requirement and no native speaker requirement. What it names instead is a C1 English level, which is a proficiency test rather than a passport test.

That distinction matters a great deal in the Philippines, South Africa, Nigeria and across Latin America, where teachers are regularly filtered out of platform work by nationality clauses they only discover after applying. Novakid’s published wording does not contain one.

Take that as an absence of a stated restriction rather than a guarantee of acceptance. Hiring is still selective, and the certificate and experience lines do the filtering instead.

Which certificate should you hold for a platform that checks?

Any of the categories Novakid names will satisfy the line on paper. Where the choice starts to matter is at the verification step, because a platform collecting your certificate as a document is a platform that can be asked to confirm it.

A regulated qualification exists on an external public record, so a company can confirm it independently rather than trusting the file you uploaded. Our Ofqual regulated Level 5 TEFL Diploma is on the Ofqual register as qualification number 610/1571/4, awarded by Highfield Qualifications under Ofqual organisation number RN5219, with 180 guided learning hours and a total qualification time of 382 hours. The separate Level 5 Advanced Diploma is 610/1573/8, with 300 guided learning hours, a total qualification time of 542 hours and 54 credits. Both register entries were confirmed by our team on 26 August 2026. They are two distinct qualifications and should not be quoted as one.

Novakid names TEYL specifically, and that is the specialism this role is actually about. Our 30 Hour Teaching English to Young Learners course is the targeted add on, and on an application that tests children specific experience it is the line that speaks directly to the requirement.

If the acronyms are the thing slowing you down, our reference page on TEFL qualifications and terminology explained sets out what each one means and which employers ask for which. The British Council’s Teaching English in primary course is a useful independent reference for what training for this age group covers.

How do you satisfy the six months with children?

By counting work you have probably already done and describing it precisely. The requirement is six months teaching English to children, and applicants routinely undersell themselves because they are thinking only of salaried classroom posts.

Private tutoring of school age learners counts, and so does a volunteer placement, a summer programme, a teaching practice component completed as part of a certificate course, and classroom assistant work where you led English activities. What matters is that you can state the age group, the dates, how often you taught and what you taught.

Write it in that order on the application. “Eleven months, ages seven to eleven, two hours weekly, phonics and speaking” is answerable. “Experience with kids” is not, and it is the version that gets filtered.

What to watch before you apply

Four things, all avoidable.

An unpublished rate is a real unknown, not a formality. Do not commit hours until you have your own number in writing and know what a cancellation pays.

The optional certificate upload is not optional in substance. The role requires one. Attach it.

Document volume slows people down. Gather your identity papers, diploma and certificate before you open the form rather than halfway through it.

Rates quoted by other teachers are not comparable to yours. They reflect a different market, a different tenure and often a different year.

Where to start

Decide first whether you clear the two screening lines, because everything else on the Novakid form is administration. If you hold a recognised teaching certificate and can evidence six months teaching English to children, you are in the pool that this platform is actually recruiting from, and that pool is smaller than the ones at Cambly and Preply.

If you clear the certificate line but not the experience line, the honest sequence is to build the children specific hours somewhere that does not require them, and to keep a dated record of age groups and contact time while you do it. Our guide to teaching kids English online sets out which platforms hire without that background, and our guide to becoming a Preply tutor covers the marketplace route where you set your own rate while you build reviews.

And if neither line is cleared yet, the young learner specialism is the cheaper and faster of the two to obtain, and it is the one Novakid names by its own acronym.