Career ideas for teacher looking for career change/ retrain

[coopekid]

Just this really, worked in education for a decade before having a career break after DC. Now looking to return to work within next year but want to explore other options first - ideally a more flexible wfh role - do these actually exist? Any ideas or experiences please. Where do I start??

EdTech is the big thing at the moment, supporting schools with devices such as iPads.

If you want to retrain them counselling is an option, lots of demand.

If you want to wfh then counselling again as a lot can be done online or you can go for most civil service jobs. You would probably apply for one in the education division of the civil service/ local authority. A lot of civil service jobs have a wfh element. And they have ridiculous big pensions.

I work in EdTech. I work in a university using virtual learning environments. But most of my job is teaching academics how to teach using technology. It’s 9-5, low stress (relative to teaching) and pays not much different to classroom teaching. While I do have an IT background, it’s my teaching experience that’s the most valuable

@slug Thanks for this. What was your route from teaching into EdTech if you don’t mind me asking?

Online tutoring. I make a full-time teacher's salary doing it in combination with exam marking.

It'll be a slow start but once you build reputation there is as much work as you can handle, depending on your subject/teaching age group.

I see quite a lot of fundraising charity applications where there’s a load of teaching on cvs early in the career.

Social work. Lots more WFH than teaching, take holidays when you want, you can retrain in a year.

I went more or less directly (via a short detour in financial technology). I started on a short term project to expand the use of VLEs in a university and basically just stayed. The tech part is relatively easy to learn, I have trained multiple people into the role, ususally administrators and the occasional new graduate, but it's a teaching background that gives me the edge.

Most academics have little or no formal teacher training and what I do is bridge the gap between the tech (which scares a lot of them though they won't admit it) and the practise of teaching and assessmentke. There is a tendency to invest in expensive bits of kit then a big push to use it. I'm not a fan of tech for tech's sake, so I spend a fair amount of time exploring with them what they hope to achieve and whether there is a simpler, cheaper or more elegant way of achieving it.

I didn't retrain, but I now work in corporate Learning & Development. It's hybrid so I'm home some of the time, and it's an awful lot less stressfu than teaching but similar money. Lots of transferrable skills from teaching.

@Yuja How did you go about doing this. Where did you look for roles etc?