Does anyone work in Learning and Development?

[Berlin14]

I'm considering a career change and am really interested in corporate learning and development but need a bit of advice. I've been a secondary school teacher for 20 years and, although I love certain aspects of the job (the actual teaching and lesson planning), I don't think I can do it for another 20 years before I retire. I have a little experience of managing/training adults as I'm a head of department but I appreciate that schools are very different to businesses. Would it be sensible for me to gain a more relevant qualification (and which one?) or should I try to get an entry level job to get more experience and then work my way up? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Following. I'd wondered similar and looked at some jib descriptions. I wondered if I needed to go in lower and work up but not sure what that would be. Its so hard to transition from teaching yet we have so many skills!

Absolutely don't waste time gaining qualifications. Most L&D jobs are basically quite straightforward. You need to be organised and have a competent grasp of tech, but mostly it's about sorting stuff out and wrangling others. Common sense stuff.

You wouldn't even need to go for an entry level job. Teaching experience/knowledge of pedagogy is more than most people have.

Find a job you like the look of. Do a bit of Googling to pick up the knowledge you don't have around any specific practices, tools and processes that particular organisation uses.

There are swathes of teachers leaving the profession and turning to L&D as a natural pivot. LinkedIn is full of them, mostly American, and they are going for instructional designer jobs. Also Facebook. It can be done, although I agree, you dont need qualifications as such, but something like CIPD L&D Level 3 or 5 is well recognised here - the US has uni degrees which is massively overkill imo. Demonstrable skills in the form of an online portfolio works well.

Interesting. I saw a couple of job descriptions I wasnt sure I had some of the essentials for. Also worried teachers would be looked down on as they are by so many on here!

It’s often a subsection of HR.

Thanks for all your messages - really helpful. That's interesting to hear that you don't think I need a qualification. More than happy to not spend money (that I don't have) on a CIPD course! What sort of salary do you think I should be aiming for? I'm in the South east, but not London.

I totally disagree that you wouldn’t need a qualification unless you want to enter at a very low level. A level 3 CIPD isn’t worth it, you would be better of doing a specific CIPD level 7 L&D cours if you want to get in at a decent level. Level 7 is around a post grad and should take about two years to obtain. In the meantime you could try to get a lower level HR admin job to give you more HR skills.

I have my own L&D consulting business and would suggest you think about whether you'd like to be more on the in-house side which can be more about stakeholder management, wrangling, booking participants etc, or the agency side where you'd potentially be exposed to more of the design and delivery. Of course these are massive generalisations depending on the size and nature of the organisations! I think you might find agencies who would be very receptive to your skills set and would recognise the value that years of teaching would give you.

L&D bod here. We’re struggling to recruit good applicants and generally get a few teachers applying (children’s sector but we provide L&D to workforce).

The ones I’ve taken on have shown they’ve got experience outwith ‘just’ teaching kids. So show that you initiated something for other teachers, led an initiative for your dept etc.

Accept that you may go in at a slightly lower level but knowing you’ll pick things up quickly. In Scotland for a L&D officer type role you’d be looking at starting on £25-28k.

Also look for charities and NHS health education type L&D posts, who you will be more easily able to link your competencies to.

Good luck!

@Hartofpixie thanks, that's really helpful - it's definitely the design and delivery aspect that I'm interested in.

If you were ok to accept 30k for your first job, just to get your foot in the door, you could do that job - whatever you could get - for a year or so. Then you would have a lot more options for your next job. The experience you would get would be worth much more than any qualification.

Thank you - that's a good suggestion. I've always been involved in training student teachers and do a lot of informal training of others in my department but perhaps I'll try to do something more official to put on my cv

I'd be more than happy with 30k - I currently work 0.8 but easily do full time hours (40+ a week) so I'm considering getting a full time job out of teaching to balance the drop in salary.

Another consideration is a lot of the jobs may well be hybrid or wfh. This means the pool of candidates is larger for applications, but the jobs are there. I read that L&D jobs have grown by 11% due to covid. Now is the time to make the change, really.