The difference employers pay attention to is whether somebody watched you teach. An assessed course such as CELTA or the Trinity certificate includes teaching practice with real learners, observed and graded, with an external moderator checking the centre's judgement. A generic online certificate does not, and cannot, whatever number of hours it prints.
Both will advertise around a hundred and twenty hours, which is a convention rather than a measurement of anything, and the number is why the two look comparable on a page. One certificate is not the same product as the other, and the schools that hire teachers do not treat them as one.
Eight facts about the qualifications
- CELTA is assessed teaching practice with real students and observed lessons, which is the thing that distinguishes it. Cambridge assesses it and the standard is consistent between centres.
- a weekend TEFL certificate is not equivalent, and employers know the difference. The gap is entirely in whether anybody watched you teach.
- 120 hours is the common minimum employers and visa authorities ask for in a certificate.
- observed teaching is what employers ask about, so a course without it is worth considerably less regardless of its hours.
- DELTA is the next step, taken after a couple of years of teaching, and it is a genuinely demanding qualification rather than a longer certificate.
- a degree is often required for a visa, in any subject, independently of the teaching qualification, and this catches people out.
- check the visa rules before the course, because the requirements are set by the destination country rather than by the training provider.
- experience outweighs the certificate after two years. The qualification opens the first door and stops mattering fairly quickly after that.
Who is asking, and what they are asking for
Online platforms and many private students want a certificate to exist. The box has to be ticked, the profile has to show something, and beyond that the specific course rarely comes up. For that purpose the cheap online certificate does the job it was bought for, and paying five times as much for a different one buys nothing at all.
Schools, universities, ministries and the better-paid international jobs ask for an assessed course by name, and several of them list the exact qualifications they accept. They are not being snobbish: they are hiring somebody who will stand in front of a class next week, and the only evidence that separates one applicant from another is whether anybody has ever watched them do it.
So this is a question about employers rather than about training, and it has a concrete answer for you specifically: look at where you actually intend to work and see which certificate is named.
Where it stops: buying by hours and price
The stall is comparing the wrong axis. Two listings, both saying a hundred and twenty hours, one costing a small fraction of the other, and nothing on either page explaining what the difference is. Choosing the cheaper certificate is a rational decision from the information on the two pages.
A year later the same person is applying for the jobs that pay properly and finds their certificate is not on the list, and the money spent is not recoverable towards the other course. The loss is the second fee plus the year.
What makes it a genuine trap rather than carelessness is that the cheap certificate is not a scam. It teaches real material, it is accepted where it is accepted, and it was honestly described. Nothing on the page said what it would not open, because nothing obliges anybody to say that.
Checking that a centre is what it says it is
Cambridge publishes a searchable list of the centres authorised to run its courses, free and public. If a provider claims to deliver an assessed Cambridge qualification and is not in that list, the claim is false, and this is the only reliable way to check it.
It replaced trusting a provider's own website about its own accreditation, which is a class of claim that nobody polices and which is trivially easy to word ambiguously.
Its limitation is scope: it covers one awarding body, so a Trinity course or another genuinely assessed qualification will not appear there and is not thereby fake. The general principle survives, though: whoever awards the certificate publishes its own list of centres, and that list is the check.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is a certificate that satisfies nobody the holder actually wants to work for. It is accepted on platforms they have already outgrown and named nowhere they are applying.
The second is an assessed course taken by somebody who only ever intended to teach online privately, which is real money and real weeks spent on evidence that no private student will ever ask to see.
Neither of those is about the teaching. What a certificate cannot do at all is set your rate, and the reason for that, along with what actually does, is turning your own English into something you are paid for.
The question this leaves is what happens on the first day after the certificate, because an assessed course gives you a handful of observed hours and the next hundred are unobserved, unplanned and yours: a shape that works with one student or with twelve, and then platforms, rates, and finding your own students.