13 Jobs for Former Teachers Who Want to Work Outside of the Classroom

You’ve devoted years of your life to teaching. Whether you got burnt out from the job or realized it’s not the right job for you, you can easily take those transferable skills and apply them in a different context so you can find a job you do love in a new environment. This list includes jobs for former teachers who are looking to step out of the classroom and dive into a whole new world.

13 Jobs for Former Teachers Who Want to Work Outside of the Classroom

1. Course Creator

A course creator has many transferable resume skills with teaching. You could be the course presenter, the person who sets up the curriculum, or the person who writes the script. If you choose to be a course creator, you can find many jobs for former teachers in this space. You have a specific knowledge set that you can teach in your own way. Whether you choose to become a course creator and sell courses yourself or you join a company that sells courses and help them with the course creation process, you’ll find that course creation as a field doesn’t have to limit you. You can choose to be as involved as you want to be. People who want to get real feedback from students might choose to go the self-employed route. Those who want to only take on select parts of course creation can join companies that have online courses as part of their marketing strategy.

2. Educational Consultant

If you’re looking to apply your teaching skills in a consulting environment, you can look at jobs for former teachers in the educational consulting industry. An educational consultant is involved in research to better create reports regarding the education system to ensure that schools have the right programs while following the policies. In this role, you might be involved in assessing the curriculum. As a former teacher, if you felt that the curriculum you were teaching students wasn’t good, this role can allow you to work on creating a better curriculum for students. You might also be involved in setting up new programs and creating the main objectives for them. Your presentation skills might be a good asset when presenting at conferences or in workshops.

3. Corporate Trainer

Former teachers might enjoy their jobs as a corporate trainer. In this role, you’ll create a curriculum for job training programs. You might present in workshops or training modules how to do a job effectively or what sort of behaviors are appropriate work conduct. You might monitor employees to ensure that they’re correctly following the training they were provided. Your training program might also need to be compliant to laws and regulations based on how certain jobs are performed. You might act as a mentor to new employees who are still learning the ropes.

4. Human Resources Manager

Former teachers who either want to work in a school board or a corporate environment might choose to apply to human resources roles. As a human resources manager you’ll be involved in the employment process. On a good day, you’ll be helping new employees onboard at a company by training them. On a bad day, you may be involved in working with difficult employees by putting them on a PIP plan or terminating employees in mass layoffs. You're involved in helping the company keep the right kind of employees. But you also have to maintain good staff members. You might create awards programs to celebrate and recognize good employees and offer annual training programs on diversity or corporate policies.

5. Content Marketer

One of the jobs for former teachers is content marketer. As a teacher, you would teach students based on a set curriculum. Content marketers also do teaching in the form of content creation. A content marketer might write blog posts, create videos or webinars, and more to help educate their users and to attract new customers. You’ll need to know how to write or produce content that hits a main revenue target. So, while you’ll still be educating people through content creation, there is a challenge of being able to make money off the content you create. However, this can be a big dopamine hit as you’ll get to see numbers rise on a regular basis as you create more content. If you love teaching but don’t want to interact with students, content marketing could be a good channel for you. You’ll still need to be well-informed about the audience you’re targeting but you don’t need to engage with customers directly unless doing research.

6. Editor

Teachers are often involved in giving feedback to students. Similarly, editors do the same for writers. If you’re a former English teacher or are a stickler for grammatical rules, you might choose to become an editor after departing the teaching profession. An editor might edit blog posts on a website, articles for a magazine, books for authors, or anyone else looking for feedback on their writing. You can find jobs by looking at freelance opportunities for editors or in-house opportunities for corporate companies with blogs. If you’re looking for a flexible job or a remote job for former teachers, editing is a good one as you don’t have to work in person to do this kind of work. If you’re looking for more freedom in your day to day, whether to raise your children or to just spend more time in the comfort of your home, editing roles could be a good fit for you.

7. E-Learning Developer

One of the jobs for former teachers you can work in is e-learning developer. You’ll be responsible for content design and development, user experience design, the technical development of programming the platform, and designing how students are assessed. You need to be able to have strong technical and presentation skills. You also need to have some visual arts experience as the e-learning needs to be visually engaging so people are paying attention to the materials. You’ll likely work cross-collaboratively amongst a team of multiple members. For example, you might work with an instructor who will teach the material while you work on creating the course materials that they present.

8. Career Coach

If you were a high school teacher teaching a careers class, you might choose a new path as a career coach. Here you are on your own career transition period. Using this time to reflect on all the possibilities of what your career could be, you could use this opportunity to help people find the perfect career for themselves. You can remind people that it’s okay to change careers at any time as you’ll have experience being a former teacher and transitioning into a new role too. Plus, right now, there are mass layoffs happening. Some roles are not hiring at the same pace they used to, such as recruiting. You could help these people who keep experiencing repeat layoffs find a new, more stable and still fulfilling career path for themselves. You can help people find new careers that are emerging allowing them to find steady employment in their future without fear of automation taking over their jobs. You could also teach career skills like executive presence to CEOs or leadership skills to first time managers. No matter how you help people in their professional lives, you could help set people up for success and help them embark on a career path they actually enjoy.

9. Tutor

The most common jobs for former teachers are tutoring ones. Many former teachers choose to go into tutoring because they still love helping students but find a big classroom too stressful for them. If you prefer one-to-one interactions more than large classrooms, you might find tutoring gives you the best of both worlds. You now get the opportunity to teach students more intimately to help ensure they achieve the academic success they want to attain. If you specialize in teaching a certain subject, such as math, science, English, physics, chemistry, biology, or a hard subject people often struggle with, you’ll likely find it easy to gain employment as a tutor. Maths and sciences often have a bigger need for tutors, so former high school teachers in these areas may choose a career path as a tutor.

10. Entrepreneur

Many former teachers want to choose jobs that have zero in common with what they did before. If that’s you, you might choose a path as an entrepreneur. Knowing how to present in front of a room of students takes a lot of confidence. Some kids can be rowdy or straight up mean. Having this experience under your belt can help you better handle criticism in front of investors when asking for funding. It can also allow you to present your company in front of a room of conference attendees. If you’re looking for a new career path, you might choose to build a business based on what really brings you so much passion and joy. You could market yourself by writing blog posts or creating videos as you’ll likely have experience with both writing and public speaking. You’ve already faced brutal honest feedback from children so getting feedback from adults will likely feel more manageable. Overall, entrepreneurship will give you the freedom of working where you want and when you want instead of having a rigid schedule.

11. Life Coach

As a former teacher, you might’ve noticed a lot of students came to you for advice. Maybe they were having issues with their parents or they were struggling with relationships with other classmates, either way you were their go-to problem solver. If you like sharing unique perspectives on how people can solve their problems or look at a situation from a different angle, you might consider life coaching. You might help people re-spark their passion, just as you did switching from teaching into a new field. You could help people set new goals, achieve personal growth, and create strategies to help them achieve a more fulfilling life. As a teacher, you educate your students. As a life coach, you can help people unlock their potential. The work you’d be doing would add meaning to your life because you still have the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.

12. Author

If you were an English teacher or have always dreamed of writing your own book, you could also become an author. Most authors become successful because they’re prolific and write many books. Most don’t make it big on their first book. It’s all of their book sales compounding that helps them become top-earning in their field. As an author, you might work with a publishing agent to get a book deal so you can be paid upfront for your books. However, you can also go the self-publishing route and publish your books independently. Keep in mind, you might need to have a full-time job in the early days of working as an author as you build up your personal brand and collection of books. But this can be a good field for you. You don’t need to be a New York Times best-selling author to achieve success as an author. You just need to write a lot of books and promote them.

13. Social Media Influencer

Social media influencers may seem jarring for a former teacher but hear me out. Most social media influencers build personal brands around a certain topic. They might educate people about science or fashion or marketing, any topic at all. Whether you build a YouTube channel or a TikTok account, you could create informative videos about a specific topic. If you were a high school teacher who taught French, you might make educational videos to help people learn French on social media. So, you’re using those presentation skills and changing the target audience of your lessons. Instead of teaching French to students in a classroom, you might teach it to a general audience in short easy-to-follow videos.

Conclusion

Changing careers can feel intimidating or scary for some. But sometimes, life pushes you on a new path allowing you to find the fulfillment you thought teaching would give you. There are so many jobs for former teachers out there that allow you to deeply connect with people, help people, and make a living too. If you’re actively looking for new job opportunities right now, you can use Huntr to help you build a resume and cover letter using beautiful templates. Sign up for Huntr today.