What Are The Best Jobs For Former Teachers Outside Of Education, Whether Working Remotely Or From Home Or Employed? Let’s Take A Look At The Options.
In the interests of full disclosure, the author of this article has had both a wife and a daughter leave their teaching jobs to find work outside of education, so has some direct experience in this area.
Let’s take a look at the options available to you, and the great news for you is this: there are a lot of options.
We will split them into different categories, and start by looking at your transferrable skills, of which there are many, but first, if you want to be notified of ALL NEW JOB OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEACHERS, enter your details here:
Transferrable Skills Of Teachers
Whilst there are some obvious transferrable skills, there are also many other skills that you have as a teacher that are perhaps not so obvious.
Transferrable skills are important to potential employers as these can speed up the process of you being able to complete your new job efficiently.
Some of the transferrable skills of a teacher include:
- Your teaching skills. We start with the most obvious one, but in any business, teaching is required across the whole workplace. From teaching new staff how to use technology, how to perform the processes required to undertake their job or teaching the improvement of particular skills, such as sales or marketing. You may need some additional training yourself, but once you have acquired the necessary skills, you can then teach them.
- Your communication skills. You have handled a room full of children on lovely sunny days and those windy, rainy days, when they are more of a handful. You have learnt to diffuse arguments, negotiate peace between class mates and put your foot down when you needed to. These skills are vital in the workplace, and particularly lend themselves to roles in the Human Resources (HR) department, where you can use them for your team as opposed to your children.
- Your creative skills. You have been creative in turning often dry or tedious topics into interesting lessons. This creativity could be applied in a variety of different roles, particular sales and marketing.
- Your administrative skills. You have juggled 100 different administrative roles whilst being employed as a teacher. From lesson plans to writing reports, memos to your team and letters to your parents. You have a lot of administrative acumen.
- Your writing skills. Perhaps something you might not have considered is your writing skills. You have a very good command of the english language, and when coupled with your ability to take an often try topic and make it interesting, you could become very skilled as a copywriter (more on that later, it has huge potential for you, and can be performed remotely from anywhere in the world!
- Technology. You have mastered a variety of different technology during your teaching career, and technology plays a huge part in any business.
- Time management. This one is a big one, as every day you have had to manage the timings of all of your children and your support staff. Time management efficiencies in business can make a big difference to the bottom line, so this is a very useful skill to have.
- Problem solving. Whatever has been thrown at you, you have had to find a way to deal with it. This expertise is invaluable.
That list makes you think, doesn’t it?
You have a long list of transferrable skills that makes you a very attractive candidate, so get that head up high and let’s move onto what you can do outside of the education field.
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Work From Home Or Remote Jobs For Former Teachers
First of all, if you are looking to work remotely, from home or anywhere, you may not realise that there are thousands of opportunities for you to do so.
You can do these jobs either on an employed basis, or freelance (working for yourself for a variety of different businesses).
There are far more freelance job opportunities available, and there are a lot of advantages for you teach of going freelance.
Let’s look at them first.
Advantages Of Freelance Vs Employed
If you haven’t come across the term before, consider freelance like a supply or locum teacher, but with the benefits of never having to go near a classroom again!
You have many skills, as outlined above, and you use these skills as a freelancer to help businesses who do not posses those skills and do not have a sufficient volume of work to be completed to warrant a full time position.
As a freelancer, you help them, along with another 10 or 20 businesses just like them each month, to complete these tasks and get paid for each of the businesses to do so.
This is probably the biggest benefit of freelancing verses employment: you spread your risk of only working for one person.
Let’s look at this and the other benefits of freelance vs employed:
- You spread your risk of only being paid by one employer. As a freelancer, you work for several different businesses so if one of them goes bust or closes down, you still have money coming in from the other ones. This spreads your risk massively, and makes your financial security easier to control.
- You have complete control over how much you work. With an employed role, you must work the hours set each and every day. As a freelancer, you can set your own hours. Need to do the school run, good, off you go, work when you get back until school run time again, then stop or do some more in the evening. It is completely up to you.
- How much you earn is completely within your control. You decide how many hours you want to work, and how much you are going to earn. However, the point I made about hours is where it gets interesting.
- It is not about how many hours you work, but the value you deliver. Until now, if you have ever counted your hourly rate, as my wife and daughter did, you will have felt slightly sickened by your low hourly rate. Well, the good news is, that as a freelancer, as your skills grow in your chosen field you will be able to charge a much higher hourly rate than you ever did as an employed teacher. More importantly, you will charge for each piece of work, so often that will be a fixed fee. It is then up to you to complete that in as short a time as possible, meaning your hourly rate gets a huge bump!
- If you don’t like one of your clients as a freelancer, you can sack them. If you don’t like your boss of an employer, it is much harder to sack them (resign) as you will lose all of your income immediately.
- You are your own boss. No more bosses, ever. You are the boss, all day and every day :).
You might be thinking that while this all sounds wonderful, you wouldn’t know where to start or what to do to become a freelancer.
Please don’t worry about that, it is so much easier than you could ever believe, and I will share with you tools that will allow you to go out and start working faster than you could ask naughty Charlie to sit down for the 10th time of the day!
Best Jobs For Former Teachers
Now that you know there is another option aside from just employment, whether you choose freelance or not, what are the best jobs for former teachers?
Let’s have a look at some.
Personal Assistant
You have seen above that one of your biggest skills above is your ability to be organised and commmunicate well, the biggest skills for a personal assistant.
There are millions of full time personal assistant rolves available, but now, with the world working largely online, there are also millions of Virtual Assistant roles available.
So instead of being tied to one desk and one boss, you can work remotely for many of them.
Tasks are as simple as orgnasing diaries, setting up meetings with clients or prospects, sending out emails on behalf of your leader etc, whatever is required to make them as efficient as they can be.
Data Entry
This one isn’t exciting, but there are a lot of people that need data typed into a computer system.
This is data entry, and it might work short term, but you will probably want something more fun and less boring longer term.
Read more about data entry jobs from home.
Become A Trainer
You already know how to teach (train) so now use your excellent skills to do the same as a trainer.
What will you train?
Any number of topics from sales to management, marketing to human resources.
What you might not know is that there are thousands of training companies out there, who have mapped out in detail the training required, they just need someone with good teaching skills to deliver it – that is where you come in!
They give you all of the materials, you use all of your teaching skills, deliver the training and get paid anything from a few hundred pounds for each day of training.
All training companies have dozens of freelance trainers on their books, you could be the next one and start earning an income the same as or more than your current one without any website or any selling required.
Copywriting
One of your core skills, whether you realise it or not, is your written English skills.
Lesson plans, letters to parents, assemblies, all of these required you to write.
Every small business on the planet needs the written word for their websites, their brochures, their sales copy, their email marketing and content marketing (growing their website so that they get more visitors from Google).
You can become a copywriter with no experience by taking one of the many excellent copywriting courses out there.
Other Completely Remote / Work From Home Jobs For Former Teachers
There are hundreds of thousands of completely remote jobs available for former teachers.
How do you find them?
There are websites that specifically advertise these jobs and look for people to fill them working as freelancers for many different companies.
The biggest one out there is Upwork.
Visit the site, scroll through the many freelancers and job opportunities, and I hope you will realise that your opportunities as a former teacher are virtually limitless!
Follow Your Hobbies Or Passion?
Why not start your own business based around one of your hobbies or passions?
The list here is limitless, but from personal training to jewellery making, upscaling furniture to creating resources for teachers to purchase from you, starting your own business will give you all of the freedom and flexibility you could ever need.
How To Find Jobs As A Former Teacher Summary
I hope by now that you believe you can find a good job, employed or freelance, because you really can.
There are just so many opportunities.
The two former teachers in my household both followed their passion and started their own businesses, one of them after earning an income from freelancing.
What story are you going to paint?
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