Career Change for Teachers: How to Find the Right Next Career

Thinking about a career change from teaching can feel overwhelming, especially when you are not sure what else you are qualified to do. Teachers develop a wide range of transferable skills, but finding the right next career means looking beyond job titles and identifying work that fits your interests, strengths, personality, and goals.

Why Teachers Consider a Career Change

Today there are many difficulties for the average teacher to face, including the school administration, parents, students, and new government regulations. There’s an even higher burnout rate for teachers when they work at under-funded schools.

If handled properly a career change for a teacher may not be a arduous task. Fortunately, they have a level of skills and training that is in demand in a variety of alternative jobs and careers.

As a teacher, you really have two sets of skills that you can leverage when contemplating a career change. First, there are your subject-specific group of skills — your communication, planning and writing skills, and your professional skills — teaching and training teaching skills. Between those two groups of skills, you have so many possible career options that you’re probably not even aware of.  Keep in mind, however, that you are not limited by those skills. If  you have the interest, the time, and the expertise, you can switch careers in any direction.

Of great import are your natural talents (as we measure by the Highlands Ability Battery). In general, the top 3 natural abilities useful for teaching are:

• Concept Organization (High score)
• Classification (Medium-High — This natural ability is important for teaching, but can also make a teacher more dissatisfied when they feel that the administration is not letting them teach the way they feel is best)
• Idea Productivity (High)

If you are high in these abilities, then your change may not require leaving the teaching field altogether. With a few strategic changes and some training courses, a teacher may find they have the qualifications to change what they are teaching. A different subject, school, or age level may be what is needed to put some spark into your teaching career.

If your desired career change is more extreme, such as finding a job in private industry, teaching skills are in great demand. The ability to communicate along with the classroom coaching abilities is vital in many interesting jobs.

What Careers Are Good for Former Teachers?

Teachers often have more career options than they realize. Skills such as communication, planning, presenting, problem-solving, organization, coaching, and working with different personalities can transfer well to many other fields.

Possible career paths for former teachers include corporate training and learning and development, instructional design, human resources, recruiting, customer success, project coordination, nonprofit work, educational technology, academic advising, and other roles that involve communication, organization, or helping people learn and grow.

The best career change for a teacher, however, is not simply the job that makes the most obvious use of teaching skills. A successful career change should also take into account your interests, personality, values, preferred work environment, income goals, and the type of work you want to be doing every day. Exploring those factors can help you narrow a long list of possibilities into careers that are genuinely worth pursuing.

Your choices are really limitless. You now just need to spend the time contemplating the direction of your life — and your next career move.

However, I don’t believe your issue revolves around your options necessarily. What is most important is knowing the type of work that you should be doing. Too often, people make a career change into something that ends up equally dissatisfying.

If you decide on the teacher career change route, a comprehensive analysis of their Big 3 must be made:  their natural abilities, needs and interests. New careers must be researched in depth. This is precisely what we do in the first stage of the Oxford Program of Career Change.