Six Alternative Careers For Teachers

When you graduated from university with that prestigious honours degree in Primary Education, all bright eyed and bushy tailed you felt incredibly excited and optimistic about your future career as a Teacher. You set out to inspire and to change lives and your mind was filled with ideas as to how to make your lessons so enjoyable and fun that your students loved learning. Flash forward three or four years down the line and perhaps you are feeling completely burnt out from your career as a Teacher.

The cute little angels that you had always envisaged teaching are not angels at all, but stapler throwing, crayon stealing, hair pulling demons. Okay maybe that’s a slight exaggeration but for whatever reason, the experience is not entirely as you expected and you are looking for a change. Here are some alternative careers for teachers to consider:

Teach English Online

Okay we know what you’re thinking. “I want a break from teaching but you’re suggesting switching teaching with… Teaching?” Okay we totally get it but hear us out…

Teaching online from home can be a completely different ballgame to teaching English in a classroom environment. For starters you are teaching from the comfort of your own home and typically, your classes will just be conducted on a one-to-one basis. Imagine how delightful that could be! Instead of teaching fractions to a classroom filled with 30 hyperactive children, you can just practice spoken English with one quiet and studious individual.  It sounds too  good to be true, right?

Teaching English online generally entails practicing spoken English with adults and children based in foreign countries (often the Far East) who want to improve their English abilities. Since many people in foreign countries want to improve their English in order to improve their career prospects amid a global economy there is plenty of demand for English Teachers. The pay is good and you can manage your own schedule – meaning as many or as few classes as you like. What’s more is that all of this is done from your home so you don’t have a long and arduous commute to work to contend with every day.

Become a Corporate Trainer

So you woke up one morning and decided that you would like to make a change from your career teaching children. That’s understandable and a degree in teaching opens the door to plenty of similar opportunities.

Perhaps there are aspects of teaching that you thoroughly enjoyed, however you have had enough with the additional complications of dealing with children (controlling their behaviors, etc). Many people consider teaching adults as a whole different, more relaxed ballgame and becoming a corporate trainer is a great opportunity to enjoy this.

Working as a corporate trainer may entail teaching specific courses related to a particular job, or it may simply be informing new employees at an organization about the company’s processes and protocols.

Become a Tutor

Have you ever noticed how children act completely differently in different environments? When you have thirty children together all crammed into one room, things can be chaotic, however in a one-to-one situation, that usually loud and brash child can become quite polite and demonstrate a fascination with history. Tutoring could be a good alternative if you are stressed out from conventional teaching. You will really be able to see the progress in children’s work and their behavior will be much better in a quieter atmosphere.

Create Informative Courses

Creating courses about skills that you possess are a great way to make a passive income (aka income that can be earned while you are asleep). Websites such as Udemy feature courses that people can purchase in order to build on and improve on particular skills. For example, courses may cover “how to build a successful blog”, “how to make money from cryptocurrency” or in your case, practical teaching advice for new teachers.

You could create courses on behavior management, lesson planning, and any number of different teaching topics. Create one or two courses to test the waters and if you start enjoying sales and success, you can add more courses to your repertoire. You only have to sell a small handful in order to make a profit, but there are many people who make a full time living from passive income in this manner.

Consider Producing Teaching Materials or Writing

Publishers of teaching textbooks and other resources and materials used in the classroom environment often prefer to hire people who have first hand teaching experience. If you taught English, then they gives you even more of a distinct advantage and you could find work in writing material for textbooks or scripts for examinations.

You don’t have to restrict your new potential writing career to academic writing  or academic paper writing services however: chances are, as a Teacher you have an incredibly good grasp of how written English should be, and how to create content that is engaging and sparks the readers imagination. Whether you are interested in writing children’s books or diversifying into a completely unrelated area, more than likely you already have the know-how.

Museum or Tourism Work

As a Teacher, you will have developed several transferable skills that will make you perfect for a museum environment, or even work in the tourism industry as a guide. For starters, you are accustomed to standing up in front of a group of people every day and delivering informative information in an interesting manner and at least when you are conducting a tour of a museum with a group of adults, rather than reading to a group of children, you will not be dealing with tantrums, fights, and pens being launched across the room at frequent intervals (we hope).

Alternative Careers For Teachers Can Be Just As Rewarding

Even if you are just looking for a shift from teaching on a temporary basis, it can be nice to experiment with something new so that you can go back to your career later feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. If you’re looking for some alternative options to teaching in a classroom environment these are some suggestions that will hopefully give you some inspiration.