Being driving instructor is stressful

In the current UK economic climate of credit crunch, becoming a driving instructor or even working as a qualified ADI is a lot of stress and hassle.

Not only do you have to work hard to keep your business afloat by aggresively marketing your driving school, you have to deal with learners looking for very cheap lessons which are not profitable for you, considering petrol costs, insurance, road tax and the fact that you also have bills to pay, and you can only work so many hours in a day before you are totally exhausted without much time left to give to your family.

Due to the lack of driving instructor shortage, many ADIs are resorting to looking for second jobs to suppliment their income, from teaching maths, to driving vans, manual gardening tasks, etc it is really a tough life being a driving instructor at the moment.

This is not made any easy by the fact that the like of red driving school, BSM, AA are constantly advertising for people to train and join an already saturated driving instruction market. Personally anyone qualifying as a new ADI at this time has his/her work cut out, especially if this is going to be their main source of income. A lot of work, stress, worrying and uncertaintity is ahead and it will take determination not to give up in the first year of operating the school/driving instructor business.

Driving Instructor risks

One of the minor drawbacks to being a driving instructor is that like any other business, you are taking a risk, and therefore your income is very unpredictable but also you might have to pay for unavoidable issues.

Recently my driving school car broke down due to a mechanical failure of the clutch, something that I couldn't have prevented, considering I had the car for only 2 months and that it had been given a service shortly before I acquired it.



The resultant effect of this driving school car breakdown for me as an instructor was 1.5 days loss of income (my leasing company only provided a spare car if off the road for 48hrs), one driving test refund plus a goodwill offer of 2 lessons, and a lot of stress, not to consider other ad hoc expenses like cab/bus fares to get to garage.
While some of these business expenses are tax deductible, your profit and loss margin is affected.

These are some of the things that those TV adverts don't tell you about being a driving instructor, not to talk about how unpredictible the driving instructor's salary is.