How to Become an Exam Teacher in 2026

By Amir Ebrahimi

A career breakthrough?!

If you want to become an EFL teacher, the best place to start is to do the CELTA. But what if you want to be an exam teacher? There are courses you can do to help you prepare, such as the How to Teach IELTS suite offered by IH, but a lot of the work will fall to the teacher – especially if your school specialises in Cambridge exam preparation.

​In this article, I’m going to share a few practical steps to becoming a full-fledged exam trainer. Before we get started, remember that you don’t necessarily have to be an experienced teacher in order to become an exam teacher. All you need is a passion for exams and a desire to stay on top of all the changes and updates that are often associated with English exams.

Soak Up All the Exam Knowledge

There’s a lot to learn when it comes to teaching exams. The experience can be very different to regular teaching, and the first and most obvious difference comes with the additional knowledge that the exams teacher needs.

A regular teacher can look at the next task in their general English coursebook and simply teach it the way it’s presented. But an exam teacher will need to know more – how the task is assessed (such as knowing how many points each question is worth, and whether spelling is important). When you first get into exam teaching, you’ll need to invest some time learning all of these things. The best way to begin is to work through each paper in turn, following the rubric for each activity, and then marking it all just as critically as you would mark your students’ work.

Once you have a good working knowledge of the exam your students are preparing for, you’ll need to keep your eye on the ball, so to speak. Exams are constantly being updated to meet the academic and professional requirements of the world we live in. As a result, you will be your students’ North Star. They will need your help to plan their preparation, find practical resources, and get ready for exam day.

You can keep up with the exams by signing up for the examination bodies’ official newsletters, checking out their webinars, and following the likes of Cambridge Assessment on social media. Look for veteran exam teachers in places like LinkedIn and try to connect with them so that when they post something exam-related, the algorithm will let you know.

Get Into Grammar

All teachers could do with knowing as much about English grammar as possible, but the exam classroom is a unique place when it comes to our knowledge of the systems of English.

Imagine a new teacher entering a general English classroom. They might not be completely comfortable with terms like present perfect, and they might struggle to remember the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. Fortunately, they have the Teacher’s Book to help – and besides, most coursebooks do a good enough job of explaining the grammar point. What’s good for the student is generally good for the teacher too.

Teaching for exams is different. As an extreme example, consider the C2 Proficiency. Imagine that your students are doing some practice of the Reading and Use of English paper, Part 2 – the Open Cloze. This is where the students have to complete the gaps in a short text. As their teacher, your job will be to explain why the answer is what it is – and as the Open Cloze can in theory test the student on everything that exists in English grammar, the teacher has to be ready to explain anything and everything.

For exams teachers, there’s no way around it – you need to have a great grasp of grammar. Keep a good grammar reference book on your desk, and get into the habit of referring to it when you’re preparing a lesson. Don’t always assume you know where the answer comes from – double-check and therefore expand your knowledge of both the grammar you’re teaching and the terminology used to describe that grammar.

Create Content

When you feel you have a good grasp of how the exam works, start creating exam-related content. This is the truest test of your understanding of how the exam is put together. Some people call this reverse-engineering – you take an existing task, see how it’s put together, and try to make your own. When it’s ready, get a volunteer in the staffroom to try it before you ask your students to have a go – you’d be surprised at how easy it is to overlook possible answers, especially in something like Reading and Use of English Part Four, the key word transformation task.

But if you do this well, you will soon find that you’ve generated a good stack of content – and then you can put it online and help others with their exam preparation. You could follow in the footsteps of Paul Harris, who wrote in Issue 50 of the IH Journal about creating an online community to help students develop their exam skills. This is one of many ways to establish yourself as a teacher with a reputation for exam teaching.

Collect Testimonials

Exam candidates often see results faster than general students – or if not faster, then certainly in a more official manner! A successful exam candidate will come out of their journey with a certificate that proves their level – and many will be happy to share the evidence (though I recommend blurring any sensitive details in any pictures of students with their certificates). Candidate testimonials are undoubtedly your gold mine as an English teacher.

Repeat

Like every other aspect of our lives, consistency is key. Repeat the cycle. Keep updating your knowledge, spread the word by creating content, gain real experience, and collect success stories. Exams are fun and full of challenges, and there is nothing sweeter than seeing your students enjoying the fruits of their labour – by getting the certificate, and thus getting into the university of their dreams, or getting a promotion at work.

​Exciting, right? But let’s hold our horses a bit and consider a few caveats, too. While exams teaching can be a career breakthrough for you (as it was for me in 2013), it is important to know what could go wrong before you jump in.

Caveat #1: Confusion and bewilderment

There are a lot of exams, and the exams all tend to vary, at least a little. The Reading and Use of English paper for B2 First and C2 Proficiency consists of seven parts, but the C1 Advanced exam also includes an eighth task, called the Cross-Text Multiple Matching activity. All three of these exams require candidates to write an essay for Task One of the Writing paper, but at C2 level there are four content points to cover instead of the usual three everywhere else.

All these little differences can lead to confusion. What worked for me was narrowing down my focus to just a few tests. Starting with one and then learning about others is a lot easier than trying to take in everything all at once.

Caveat #2: Market Fluctuation

This one expands on the super-niche idea. Times change, and trends shift. Some exams suddenly lose their lustre – after the renewal of the conflict in Ukraine, many of my Russian students suddenly encountered difficulties sitting the IELTS exam. A colleague told me that when he started teaching in Poland, the C1 Advanced exam could be taken in lieu of the school-leaving exam as proof of English level, but then the government stepped in with an updated version of the advanced matura and suddenly that colleague found that he was hardly getting any C1 Advanced exam preparation students.

Being ready to diversify is a must.

Conclusion

All in all, exam training can be a very rewarding and challenging experience. Exam candidates are different. They tend to be more cooperative and motivated (there are exceptions to the rule, of course). This usually means you’ll see results faster and can focus on goals more than you could in a general lesson – but to get into exams teaching in the first place you can do a lot worse than to take on the advice I’ve shared here!

Biography