New Jobs for Burned-Out Teachers Mean Learning the Rules of the Corporate World

Many teachers in transition say they are confronted with a mystifying array of training programs and online career coaches. They lack a compass for charting a job search in the business world and are often stuck at even the first step.

The upshot for many is that their path to a new career is often littered with false starts or money wasted on counterproductive training. Some former teachers struggle to adjust to the rhythms of corporate life. Others have found themselves mourning the loss of a profession, or calling, they once thought would carry them through their working lives.

“You’re desperate and see, ‘Teachers, this is great for you!,’” says Raven Wilson, who paid $3,000 for a training course in instructional design as she prepared to quit her job as an elementary-school teacher in Newport News, Va. Though she finished the course, she hated it.

Ms. Wilson, 30 years old, is among the more than 900,000 people who quit jobs in state and local education last year, according to federal data. Resignations from private education, meanwhile, neared 600,000. According to LinkedIn, the share of K-12 teachers on the site who quit to start nonteaching roles climbed 66% from November 2020 to November 2021, as the pandemic turned in-school education upside down.

And the teacher exodus could grow in the coming months. In a National Education Association poll conducted in January, 55% of teachers said they would leave education sooner than planned, up from 37% who said so in August.

Ms. Wilson says the connections she made on LinkedIn and through online groups with free career resources for teachers helped her get back on track by pushing her to think about what she loved about teaching that could parlay into a new role. The path she landed on: helping teachers and administrators master classroom software.

Ms. Wilson started with an education tech startup in April. In the fall, she moved to a similar role with more pay, which she found through a LinkedIn contact. These days, she says she receives as many as two dozen messages a day from teachers looking to change careers.

It is important for teachers’ resumes to highlight the precise skills they have acquired in the classroom that will translate to a new role, says Daphne Gomez, a former educator who has been helping teachers shift to new careers since 2019. Instead of listing that you organized field trips, for instance, say you coordinated three annual events for hundreds of attendees, including marketing and vendor management, she advises.

Discussing teacher burnout too much can be a red flag in job interviews, she also warns. Instead, she suggests job hunters frame their new career quest in positive terms, focusing on what they liked about teaching and how it will translate to the role.

Some former teachers caution against picking a new career field mostly because it is in demand or promises higher pay. Lissett Bohannon says she loved her work as a high-school guidance counselor in Austin, Texas, but not the stress of doing it amid a pandemic.

At first, she explored enrolling in a coding boot camp. Then she heard from college-search site Niche.com, which had noticed the TikTok account she often used to communicate with students.

The conversation ultimately led to an offer for a content-marketing manager position, which she says was a better fit than coding—and came with a pay raise.

“I had to take a chance on myself, my mental health, my well-being and still following my passion but in a different way,” says the 36-year-old Ms. Bohannon, adding that she is now able to help students on a larger scale than she could in her counseling role.

As more hiring managers gain experience with former teachers, some are specifically requesting them for certain roles, says Katelyn McMahan, a manager at Aspireship, a tuition-free, software sales-training platform. That is particularly the case with companies in financial, education and human-resources technology in search of entry-level sales recruits, she says.

“They’re looking for people who have that natural curiosity, that stamina,” she says.

Jeff Jenkins, who heads sales and marketing at RTA, a Glendale, Ariz., company that provides vehicle fleet-maintenance software, says 30% of the resumes he has received in recent months come from teachers, some of whom he has hired for software training and sales executive roles.

“Teachers, just because of what they’ve experienced, they seem like they are a lot better fit for the workforce than other people who come out of different industries,” he says.

Twice, teachers he interviewed initially hesitated in taking the job because they would no longer automatically have summers off. Both ultimately accepted. “The increase in money and company culture swayed them,” he says.

For 58-year-old Mary Michailidis, one of the biggest adjustments in leaving her job as an elementary-school principal late last year was grieving the loss of her career as an educator, which she did with the help of a therapist.

In January, she enrolled in a series of free workshops at a community college near her home in Mendham, N.J., on topics such as writing an eye-catching cover letter, answering the most common interview questions and using LinkedIn as a networking tool. The process has helped her to imagine a new professional future and emboldened her to be a more fearless networker.

“You have nothing to lose by talking to someone,” she says. “You’re only going to learn something more and they’re going to learn something from you.”

Write to Kathryn Dill at [email protected]