From Teaching to Business - Five Attractive Assets Experienced Teachers Offer the Business World

Thinking about looking beyond teaching to pursue opportunities in the business world?
If your working experience has primarily been in the teaching profession, you may perceive yourself to be at a disadvantage when competing for jobs in the business world. And that lack of experience in the business world could be a handicap, if you let it be.

But if you examine your professional experience properly, and make a deliberate effort to use your your resume and interviews to educate prospective employers about your abilities, you'll find that you bring several very valuable assets to the business environment.
Let's look at just five of the attractive qualities an experienced teacher can bring to a business:

1. You are accustomed to working independently to achieve organization goals. Employers regularly struggle with employees who need constant guidance to achieve results. But you have years of developing your own lesson plans, so make sure the employer knows that the work you do outside the classroom is the key to your success in the classroom. And you accept that topics and goals are set by school administration, by state and federal regulation, and even by the texts and other tools your school has chosen for you. In short, the organization presents targets, and then depends on you to work independently to help students reach those targets -- just as a business employer will have business goals, and will appreciate your ability to work on your own to achieve those goals.
2. You know how to work with limited resources. This one will take some employer education, as many business people tend to think that those in the public sector know little about working within a budget. Make it clear that many school budgets are under enormous pressure these days, and that you know that you have to achieve results with what is available, that there won't be any more resources handed to you just because you wish you had more. If you have been achieving good results with flat or declining (inflation-adjusted) resources over several years, make sure you highlight that in your resume and interviews.
3. You work with a diverse team every day to achieve results. Any good teacher knows how to work with a wide variety of people in a broad range of positions. Naturally, you have to respond to the principal and other administrators. But you also have to work with colleagues in other subjects and departments, and most teachers depend on good relations with, for example, custodial and facilities staff to manage special projects and extracurricular activities. Being able to work with people who are different from you, both personally and in their job functions, is a powerful skill to bring to a business workplace.
4. You adapt your style to fit specific situations. Effective teachers do not take a "cookie cutter" approach to students, treating every single individual the same way. They know that different students have different needs, and respond to different motivators. The same is true in the workplace, and flexibility and resourcefulness in dealing with individuals, and individual situations, will be much more productive for a business than trying to do everything the same way every time. This is an especially appealing asset if you are applying for a supervisory or managerial position.
5. You are not afraid to measure your results. Schools vary in how they measure teacher performance, but all teachers are accustomed to measuring the results of their work through tests, grades, and feedback from parents and administrators. Businesses are always struggling to objectively measure the outcomes from efforts to implement key business strategies, and you will join the business completely at home with the idea that the results of your work will be quantified, and that you may change the way you do things based on objective results.

Your prospective employers probably have some preconceptions about life in the teaching profession, so don't let them assume they know how you fit into the business world. If you actively educate employers about the valuable assets you bring to business, you can leverage your years of teaching experience into an advantage, over other applicants, in your quest for business employment.

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