In episode 203 of the Teacher Career Coach Podcast, Daphne tackles two pressing questions on every transitioning teacher’s mind: Will AI steal the jobs you’re eyeing outside the classroom? And what do hiring managers really think about candidates using AI for resumes and applications?
Drawing from extensive research, conversations with CEOs and recruiters, and insights from the 2025 Transitioning Teachers Job Market Survey, Daphne explores the realities of AI-driven job displacement in roles like customer service, editing, and tech positions. She shares her own apprehensions about AI’s ethical and environmental impacts while offering practical advice on staying adaptable, leveraging transferable teaching skills like public speaking and critical thinking, and crafting standout applications in a competitive market.
Whether you’re burned out and tempted by AI tools or strategizing your next pivot, this episode provides honest, actionable guidance to navigate an uncertain job landscape, without the shame. Tune in for optimism, transparency, and steps to future-proof your career. Visit teachercareercoach.com/course for more support.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Teacher Career Coach podcast. I’m your host, Daphne Gomez, and in this episode I’m gonna cover two big questions that everybody has been asking me to talk about. One is AI taking the jobs that you may be interested in and two. What are hiring managers saying about people who are using AI for the resumes or application process?
And while I’ve been thinking about this podcast topic for the last two, three months and researching it, this one was pretty hard for me to write upfront. I’m gonna talk about the two main reasons why this is a more challenging podcast topic for me. First reason being I. Did really do a lot of research to write this.
I read a lot of articles. I talked to CEOs, I talked to hiring managers, and, even looked into some of the answers through the transitioning teachers job market survey for 2025. But the truth is, you know, I will never really have a 100% accurate prediction because this is just going off of what we think might happen in the future.
And this is something that’s rapidly shifting. By next week, AI could improve in the ways that I right now think that it’s lacking. Or companies could be held legally responsible in a way that make them far less likely to use AI over a human. Right now, I think companies are, or AI itself is starting to back away from offering legal or any sort of health or medical advice.
Because of situations where it’s giving inaccurate information . There’s also a chance that legislation could pass that regulates and slows down its adoption. I think that these are long shots, but while there are no federal protections in place right now to shield workers from AI driven displacement, there are some legislative legislative efforts that are underway.
And the second reason why this has been a hard one for me to write is. I didn’t know how much of my own personal opinion I should put into this episode, but I think that it’s worth me saying I have, conflicts of interest. Here I am ethically. Opposed to some of the ways that AI is getting its content, some of the impacts it has on our environment, how it is displacing workers, and at the same time I have used it, so I’m not a purist here that has never tried it before.
I’ve actually been trying to implement it a little bit more because I do know that it’s important to have a solid knowledge of how it works, especially if you are staying up to date with your corporate skills. But it’s a pretty polarizing topic even in the corporate space. My social media feed with business owners and CEOs is consistently filled with people who are either praising AI or just constantly dunking on it.
But like I said, I don’t think that it’s going anywhere. I think that there might be some changes with it in the future. And even with all of my personal thoughts about it, I’ve found it really useful at times. Especially when I’m completely burned out. And I know that there are so many of you who do find it really helpful when it comes to writing lesson plans or doing things.
So I don’t want you to listen to this and think that I’m shaming you in any way there. It is just something that I wanted to make sure I addressed my own concerns with it so that you knew that this might be coming from a lens of someone who is a little bit apprehensive about it. Going into the very first question, AI taking jobs, I think that this is something that there are many people who, for a long time.
We’re trying to skirt around this issue and saying, AI is not going to take jobs. It’s not gonna replace humans. It’s just gonna make you more efficient, productive. It’s gonna make our lives a lot easier. And while it does make people more efficient, it does make people more productive. It may make some jobs easier.
It is taking jobs and there are more CEOs who are admitting that layoffs are because of AI or that they’re not hiring new people because of the amount of work that AI is able to do at their businesses right now. And there’s also starting to be. More and more research around what are the most exposed roles when it comes to susceptibility to losing your job and being replaced by ai.
And there’s one article that I read that was doing this research by seeing what people were able to complete. The task in its entirety through ai. So what types of tasks were people asking AI to do and what AI was able to do without a lot of prompting back and forth. And some of the more exposed roles are like interpreters, customer service representatives, editors, they said public relations specialists, technical writers. They also said mathematicians and data scientists. And I’ve read software engineers. This is just speculation. This isn’t the rules that have been cut the most. So that’s something to continue to watch and make sure that you’re reading, you know, the Wall Street Journal has done a lot of different articles on this, so that’s one of the best resources to continue to kind of watch and monitor if this is something that you’re really interested in following. One thing that goes without saying is if you are using AI to do your research, please ask it to only give you links to reputable sources because it wants to please you and it wants to give you the answer that you want to hear.
I think that’s one of the biggest faults that I see with it is you have to really prompt it to give you honest, hard feedback. You have to make sure that you tell it, to give you honest, hard feedback. And then sometimes if you prompt it too hard to give you honest feedback, it can be more of like contrarian, where it’s just only gonna give you negative feedback, even if it’s not necessarily accurate or needed.
When I was researching, I was talking to CEOs, hiring managers in the last few months, and one CEO who works for an ed tech company, told me something that’s. Optimistic and hopeful. He said that while they know that looking at the books, they could save a lot of money if they ended up outsourcing a lot of their work to chatbots.
They know that education is a relationship driven business and that it could potentially hurt them in the long run. So that’s not something that they are considering whatsoever. And so there, there are a lot of cases, there are a lot of companies that. Really aren’t planning on outsourcing a lot of their humans for AI or chatbots, but there are enough that I think is gonna do a dent to the already shaky job market.
And I just wanna be completely transparent with that. I’ve also been putting off recording this podcast episode until way too late. So this is Monday, November 10th, and it’s going to air on Thursday and it still needs to be sent off to the editor, but there was no October jobs report because of the government shutdown, which means that we don’t have a lot of insight into what has happened.
But there have been some big layoffs that have happened in the last month or so. And so as of right now, the market, the job market is still. Extremely challenging. That doesn’t mean that former teachers are not getting hired. There are still former teachers who are getting hired. It also doesn’t mean that we know how long this job market is gonna last.
And I don’t want you to completely put your search on hold just based on this information that I’m giving you. I just wanna let you know what I’m seeing on my end to help you be better informed and make the best decision for yourself. And also be prepared when you start entering this job market with different strategies or different approaches.
And with this information in mind. Now, going onto the second question, how do hiring managers feel about ai? Just piggybacking on what I just said, the job market is right now really challenging, and that means that there are more applicants than there are open positions, and so companies are in this position that they can be really selective.
They really don’t have to compromise with the people that they start to interview because they’re probably getting so many applications when you are submitting a low effort or a low quality application. You’re less likely to make the cut among people who get interviews. There was a New York Post article that I read where recruiters were talking about the easy ways that they could tell candidates were using chat GPT on the resume, and just think about how you can tell when students are using chatGPT.
Like some of the examples were everyone who was applying was using the exact same phrasing, or there’s just so much copy and paste verbatim from the actual job posting itself. But one example that they said was they had two um, questions for a marketing position where they asked for two specific examples of their, of your favorite company ads, and a significant amount of people who responded, chose the exact same two companies, the exact same two ads for the same reasons.
So think about it like how you would probably be able to catch your students. After a while, you start to see these signs and these clues and the hiring side sentiment is split. Some recruiters don’t care if AI is used while others say that it’s a complete turnoff or even a reason for them just to reject your resume altogether.
And so knowing what we know. Now that we went through those two big questions, here’s what you can do about it with your job search today. First, if you feel a little bit uncertain that the rules that you’re applying to are even gonna be around in three to five years, just remember that you are going to be using your strongest traits to help you stay flexible and adaptable once you’re in your new position.
One of my friends who has an amazing business where he helps people learn how to fine tune their public speaking skills. His name’s Jay Acunzo. He actually made a really good point on one of his posts on Instagram recently where he talked about how public speaking skills are some of the strongest skills that help you stay flexible and get promoted more, become more successful in your career.
And I couldn’t agree more, especially with my own personal career trajectory. After I left teaching, I was a fifth grade teacher, and then I immediately started working for Microsoft and their education department, and then I started working for GoGuardian as an instructional designer. And both of those roles really depended on my ability to be confident speaking, whether it was in meetings or whether it was in presentations or trainings. And that’s something that as a teacher, you’re already bringing that transferable skill into your next role, and you’re probably bringing in critical thinking skills, relationship building skills, and.
The more you expose yourself to roles outside the classroom, the more skills you’re gonna get naturally good at. I just don’t want you to think that you have to commit to the next identity forever. Your next career is not your forever career. I started out as an educational consultant and I talked about it back in episode 1 95 when I explained where I’ve been during my break, but.
If I wanted to pivot to a full-time position right now, my heart’s really pulling me towards nonprofit communications roles. The teaching to your next thing, pivot is the biggest reinvention that you’re gonna do, but everything after that, most likely won’t feel as big. You’ll have built a network and you’ve exposed yourself to different roles and different departments within that universe where you can start to really understand what the next thing might be.
And this is all me talking about, like worst case scenario, you get into a role and then AI just, whew. Takes it off of the whole planet and no one else use does that role ever again. There’s no other companies, and that is a worst case scenario that most likely is not gonna happen. But if you’re nervous about getting laid off or about job security, I get it.
And I think it’s a really valid concern and it’s something that you need to think through. I am the type of person that does everything out of a huge abundance of caution. And other people are bigger risk takers, and so if you’re a big risk taker, you can probably fast forward through the rest of this podcast episode.
But for me, talking out those worst case scenarios really helps me understand if it’s as big of a risk as I might be saying in my head, or if it’s something that, as Marie furlough said is figureoutable. So if you leave teaching. You do it in a way that leaves it where you’re able to return back to the classroom, maybe not your exact job or at your exact school or your exact district, and you do get a new job and you someday get laid off if you weren’t able to get a new job as quickly as you’d like.
In a different company doing the exact same thing. Could you substitute, teach and make that work for a little bit while you’re still applying for other roles? Could you get back into the classroom? Do you think that there’d be enough openings in the location where you’re at? These are all really big questions and really important ones, especially when the job market feels a little bit shaky and uncertain.
Some people look at this scenario and they say, I know in my gut I can make it work if this doesn’t work out for me. And I know that it’s important for me to know that I tried and took the risk and I saw if the grass was greener on the other side, saw if this was a good fit for me, and I know I’ll regret not trying.
What we’ve seen happen far more often, especially with our transitioning teacher job market survey, is that when teachers were laid off, they, from their second job outside of the classroom, they were able to find other positions in other companies. There were a small percentage that did return back to the classroom and they said, they didn’t regret it, that they ended up getting a little bit of a breather from teaching and they came back with a little bit more of a renewed energy for it, that things were better than when they left.
But the majority of those people who answered the survey, who were at one time laid off and found new positions, said that they. Pivoted careers or they found the exact same career in a different company. And so it is something that’s figureoutable, but you have to figure out your level of risk and how to make it as safe and secure for your family as possible.
And then going into, when you’re using AI for applications, I completely get, if you are doing this because you were burned out and you’re trying to save time, but please do not copy and paste everything that. AI is saying you can use AI to put together your thoughts or help you get all of your bullet points in order, but just make sure that you are double checking what it is writing.
It can embellish or just make up or inflate your accomplishments. I’ve had it just add bullet points that I didn’t ask it to add when I was trying it out with writing resumes before. Always apply on the company pages and use references when possible. Don’t use auto appliers unless you’re seeing some really magical results by them.
But I haven’t had anyone get really good results from them so far that I’ve asked right now. Just know employers are flooded with a lot of applicants for each of the job postings, and most of them are generic AI generated responses that blend in with one another. Being creative, writing it yourself and making sure that you’re upskilling and really adding your accomplishments, your unique accomplishments to your resume is gonna help you stand out, and I truly believe that right now the answer is not to mass apply.
I’ve always been against spraying and praying, but especially right now, I would really lean into a highly targeted, really strategic job search. I would focus on quality over quantity, and I would probably submit a much lower volume of applications for roles that. I know that I’m extremely qualified for and also try and get ENTs with the company to find out when they’re gonna post.
If it’s a larger company and you have someone who works there, and try and apply, you can do, you can sort on LinkedIn to see when the jobs have actually been posted within a certain timeframe so that you can only apply to the jobs as they are the freshest possible. And hopefully that gives you. Some action items to do to help you combat what is happening right now in the current job market when it comes to ai.
Thank you so much for being a listener of the Teacher Career Coach podcast right now. The Teacher Career Coach course is open, so if you want step-by-step help to walk you through all the things that we talked about, you can go to teachercareercoach.com/course. We’ll see you on the very next episode.
RESOURCES
- If you are struggling right now, please seek help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 802-273-8255
- Get the template! Writing a Teacher Resignation Letter to a Principal
- Take the FREE QUIZ: What career outside of the classroom are you qualified for?
- If you know it’s time to start your transition and are looking for resources and guidance, check out the Teacher Career Coach course today!
- Join our growing community (and connect with Daphne) on Instagram @teachercareercoach.
