In this episode, our Career Coach, Emily Schultz, is back! We talk about what it is like for her as a recruiter, trends we’re seeing with transitioning teachers, and give advice on how teachers can stand out in the job market.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Behind the scenes with our career coach
Daphne:
Hey Emily, thank you so much for being here today.
Emily:
Hi, Daphne. Great to see you. Great to be on the show again. I’m so excited.
Daphne:
So if people have not listened to your last podcast, we talked a little bit about your experience working as a recruiter and you were also a teacher before, but do you mind sharing just high level overview of your experience working in education and outside of education and with Teacher Career Coach?
Emily:
Sure. So I spent 11 years in a classroom. The majority of my years were as a middle school teacher. Love middle schoolers. I had a couple odd years with a third, fourth split, but other than that I was sixth, seventh, eighth grade teacher, English language arts and social studies. And when I decided to pivot, I pivoted into recruitment and I got a job working for a very large RPO, which stands for a recruitment process outsourcing firm, which means a firm that other companies go to help them with all of their recruitment needs. I spent four months there going through a pretty intensive training program and was assigned to a project there where I worked with several senior recruiters and I had one senior recruiter who really mentored me and believed in me and was really impressed by what I did and she was going to another company and she said, “Why don’t you come with me?” So I went from the RPO to a tech company where I was an internal corporate recruiter recruiting for all types of roles, sales roles, operations roles, business analysts, IT roles as well.
Daphne:
And then during that time, I think you were working at that first tech role, were at that first recruiting position, that’s when we hired you on at Teacher Career Coach as well, just as a career clarity and resume review coach, someone who could help teachers through the process. And I know that you know this, but we always look for someone who has experience from the hiring perspective in order to give the best advice to a wide variety of teachers who are looking to transition because not everyone’s going into the exact same role. Not everyone has the exact same experience, and it’s so important that it’s someone who’s touched hundreds of resumes and actually made hiring decisions based on those resumes to give that accurate advice.
Emily explains the differences between a recruiter and a hiring manager
But I think that there are some people who probably have some misconceptions about the difference between a recruiter or a hiring manager. Do you mind sharing the differences between them?
Emily:
No, absolutely, and I think it was really interesting coming from the world of education for 11 years into the corporate hiring world, which operates completely differently. For all of my teaching jobs I had, I never spoke with a recruiter. I was always speaking directly with the principal who at the corporate level that would be the hiring manager. So the main goal of a recruiter is to match qualified candidates to open positions, and the way this works is they will have a meeting with the hiring manager before they even post a job to decide, okay, what is the job description going to look like? What does the ideal candidate look like to you?
What is the timeline that you need to get someone in? What does your schedule look like for interviewing? What are the questions that you’re going to ask and what are the hard skills and the soft skills that are most important to you? A good recruiter will also be consultative with a hiring manager if they have an idea or a picture of a perfect candidate that is unrealistic because recruiters are also looking at here’s the range that we can pay for the role and here’s what we want. So if you have a hiring manager that is saying, I want someone with 10 years experience and we’re going to pay 50K, it’s the job of the recruiter to consult that hiring manager and say, “Hey, here’s what we’re seeing in the market.”
Daphne:
And also whether or not you’re seeing a lot of candidates with 10 years experience of hey, this might take a little bit longer. Are you willing to budge? Are you willing to go to two or three years of experience? Is that kind of the conversations that you feel like you had often in those roles?
Emily:
Oh, absolutely. And when I’m working with people from the course, I liken it to house hunters where you might see somebody on house hunters when they’re starting their hunt. They say, here’s the five things I must have, and then when they get to the end and they show the three options, none of those three options have all five of those things. So that conversation with the hiring manager looks like, “Okay, you’ve just given me 10 things. What are the seven things you got to have and what are the things that you can budge on?” And then what happens at that point is you post the job and something to know about recruiters is recruiters are working at a large scale, they’re not looking to fill one job. They can be looking to fill anywhere from 15 to 60 jobs at the same time, so they have a lot of administrative work to do to sift through all of those applicants.
It’s a lot of work. They act as a buffer between the candidate and the hiring manager, but they also act as quality control. They’re sifting through tons and tons of applications. They’re deciding who are the 10 or less candidates that I see here that can make it all the way through these rounds and would be the best fit so that a hiring manager isn’t having to look at 350 applications. They simply don’t have the time. They’re still doing the daily operations, they’re still managing people, so hiring is a part of their job, but it’s not their main job and the recruiter makes it easier on them. The recruiter says, “Hey, out of 450 applicants, here’s the eight resumes I really want you to look at.” And then the hiring manager might say, “Here’s the four people that I want to see in front of me.”
Daphne:
So you made a really good point. This is a little bit off the cuff, but it’s something that I just saw happen on LinkedIn this week, and it’s one of those prime examples of there are so many people on LinkedIn giving career advice that do not have experience from the hiring side. There are so many people offering services, coaching services, resume services, job hunting strategy that is sometimes just frankly made up advice. And one of the things that went viral this week was the advice that in this competitive market don’t apply to jobs, just message the recruiters and tell them why you’re qualified for the positions to beat out the other candidates and show your interest. And it went viral with people like I was so discouraged because there’s so many applicants. That’s great advice, thank you so much. And then also viral with recruiters saying absolutely do not do this, apply to the job.
I need to have your resume in my hand or I will not be able to find you because like you said, there’s just so much admin work, you’re juggling so many candidates, so unless they’ve actually applied, there’s going to be a really hard time for you to figure out who that person is or you’re not going to take the time to say, okay, well go ahead and apply and then I’ll remember you because you’re working with so many people at the same time. Do you feel like there were a lot of misconceptions about how recruiters worked and best practices of how to get your foot in the door based off of people giving inaccurate career advice when you were in that recruiting position?
Emily:
Absolutely, and I can tell you I’ve been on that end with people messaging me because I worked at a company that had all remote roles, so very competitive. A lot of people wanted to apply to those jobs and I would have tons and tons and tons of people reaching out and messaging me. And if I was looking to fill 30 jobs and I had 300 applicants for each of those 30 jobs, if I had someone randomly messaging me and saying, “Can you tell me a little bit more about this job?” Or, “I’m looking for another job, can you help me?” I absolutely didn’t have the time or capacity to respond to that person, and occasionally I would get messages and then I would look up in my applicant tracking system to see if that candidate was in there and if they weren’t, I needed to just move on.
You really have to be careful with your time as a recruiter because you have jobs that have tons and tons of applications, but you also have jobs where you’re having to proactively seek out applicants. And I think that the misconception is people think that they’re going to be courted, they think people are going to flock to my LinkedIn page and they’re going to offer me jobs. And something that you need to understand as well about LinkedIn is LinkedIn Recruiter is a completely different view of LinkedIn that we don’t even see. So there were jobs that I had where I didn’t have tons of applicants, and those were jobs that had really specialized skill sets or were higher level. So for example, lead DevOps engineers. So someone that has experience as a DevOps engineer and leading teams, people with those specialized skill sets, they don’t necessarily have to apply to jobs.
Recruiters are trying to hunt them down. So I would be sourcing on LinkedIn Recruiter, which is a different view that candidates can’t see on LinkedIn, but I wouldn’t be looking at the homepage and going through posts from lead DevOps engineers talking about what they did or re-posting articles. I was using a really specific tool to find keywords for specific skills and these are skills that your average transitioning teacher is not going to have. So when we think about the types of roles that we’re transitioning into, these are roles where there’s plenty of applicants, there’s a steady pipeline of candidates. So I was never seeking out candidates for roles like that because I could just look at my candidate pool and find high quality applicants there.
Emily talks about why reaching out to a recruiter can help you stand out
Daphne:
Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong I don’t think with actually messaging the recruiter and giving a little bit of substance, a little bit of flare, making yourself stand out and saying, “By the way I applied for this position and this is why I think I stand out and this is why I love this company, please make sure to check out my resume.” Sending a quick message like that after you have applied to the role can absolutely help you.
Emily:
Absolutely. Yes. And I want to, before I forget, so I can think of a specific instance where this happens, and this also has to do with the nature of the job. If you’re going for a sales role or a customer success role, something where you’re in a position where you have to be persuasive and you’re client facing and you have to be a little bit aggressive, this can look really good.
And I had a specific role. I hired high volume sales role that I hired for at the company I was most recently with and there was a candidate who had applied and that candidate also messaged me and that candidate also messaged the hiring manager and the hiring manager pinged me and said, “Hey, I want to get this person in front of me.” But the key is she had applied and something as simple as not applying and reaching out could have just made that message go bye-bye. He was able to quickly pull up, and hiring managers can pull up candidates in the applicant tracking system as well. So that hiring manager pulled it up, looked at her resume and said, “Hey, I want to see this person,” and that does happen.
Daphne:
It’s something that I feel like a lot of people get nervous about, sending that extra message or doing that, going the extra mile. If it is a job that you’re excited about, it cannot hurt to go a little bit above and beyond that is Abby who works on our customer support team and talks to transitioning teachers in the course and you know her very well from working together. That was one of the main reasons why she stood above the other candidates was she followed up after our interview and sent this really amazing well-written message to us explaining that she felt silly about one of the interview questions, but really did a great job of articulating herself and we were like, she went above and beyond to send this, but also she’s showcasing how well she does in written form, which is the primary thing we’re looking for in this role.
And so the fact that she gave us so many samples of what her writing style would look like that really helped her stand out. So thinking about what the skills and the strengths are needed for the particular role and trying to put a little bit of your personality into it can really help people who do have a large applicant pool and they are looking for someone who’s either gritty or kind or has a keen attention to detail. I want to talk about all of the work that you’ve been doing with coaching clients as well because you do resume review calls for Teacher Career Coach course clients, but this is really kind of, it’s due to all the work that you did as a recruiter as well.
Emily walks through the types of coaching sessions she does at Teacher Career Coach
You’re basically going through the same process but actually giving feedback to the candidate in live time on a call. Something that I feel like a lot of people are missing when they send out resumes and they don’t hear anything back and then they’re wishing a hiring manager or whoever recruiter would give them that feedback. That is what you’re doing on these calls. When you jump on one of them, what are the top three things that you look for right off the bat when you’re looking at a resume that a transitioning teacher has done?
Emily:
So top three, and we do different types of calls, just want to make sure that’s out there. So we do career clarity calls for people who are like, “Hey, I don’t even know where to start.” Maybe I’ve taken the quiz and there’s these three wildly different things that I’m interested in. With those I’m trying to find out motivators, and a lot of recruiters will do that too. They want to find out candidates motivators before they put them in front of a hiring manager. I also do resume review calls and I do job search strategy, LinkedIn optimization, and I will do interview prep calls as well, but resume. So the resume is so important. That’s the first thing that anybody is going to see, so you really need to be representing yourself as well as possible. It’s a marketing document. What I look for first and foremost is can I tell what type of job they’re applying for and if I can’t tell what type of job they’re applying for, a recruiter can’t tell and a hiring manager can’t tell, and it’s not the job of a recruiter to decide where you would fit.
Daphne:
If it’s like generic enough resume that you think you’re going to send it for a customer support role where you’re answering a lot of emails and doing a lot of one-on-ones with client or instructional design where it’s really tech heavy and you’re creating adult learning theories. Those are two very different roles and I do see that there are a lot of people who just try and zhuzh up their resume with corporate translations and send it to all of the different positions without really identifying, okay, this is the type of role I’m going for, these are the bullet points that are the most important. What would be another red flag that you see when you are looking at transitioning teachers’ resumes?
Emily:
Another common thing is not a speckle of numbers, no metrics. And this goes back to I think one huge, there’s a lot of misconceptions about our jobs as teachers, and this was actually evidenced in a conversation I had with somebody pretty high up at one of my old companies who was like, “You’re such a great recruiter, but I’m surprised by this with your background because recruiting is so data heavy and you’re just a teacher.” And this person wasn’t trying to be nasty, this person wasn’t trying to put down teachers. He really didn’t understand that I had spent hours and years of my life in data talks and unpacking the data and talking about what story does the data tell. People don’t know this about our profession and they won’t know it until we start putting data on our resumes. So when I thought back to all my experience in those data meetings, I really had to start to think what are some data points?
What are one or two data points that I can pull out that show how successful I am as a professional? Teachers are not the type of professionals where we can say, I think I did a good job because I feel good and the kids feel good and they’re happy. No, you look at your map scores, you look at your assessment data. If you’re an advanced placement teacher, you look at your AP pass rates. Even more if you are doing train the trainer and you are teaching your whole staff of 50 how to use Canvas as a learning management system and then everybody has to use a Canvas as a result, well that’s a hundred percent implementation rate, but you have to put numbers on your resume. It breaks up the wall of text. And it also shows people in the corporate world, I know how to use numbers, I know that data proves if I’ve done a good job or not. So when I look at a resume and I don’t see a single number, that concerns me.
Daphne:
Yeah, and I think you said something that reminds me of a lot of conversations we have. It sounds like that higher up at that place that you were working at was expressing something that I think society has taught us to believe about ourselves and that is that we’re quote unquote, “Just a teacher,” and that really becomes that self-confidence, low self-confidence is starting to be relayed in when we start to write our resumes and try and brag about ourselves. We don’t want to put these bullet points down like, oh, well, that’s not something I should add. I was just a teacher and I know we’ve had these conversations where you’re on calls and you’re like, this teacher did this and she didn’t even realize she should put it on. She was downplaying something incredible that she did, that is great experience that is going to look really amazing on her resume.
But when I talked to her about it, she was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was anything.” It just really downplayed it. Can you think of a couple of examples of people that you’ve been on coaching calls with that had great experience? Off the top of my head, I remember I believe someone created maybe the district-wide training program of how to use maybe technology or something around those lines of they were in charge of creating the district-wide technology training program for when they were going to remote learning, but they didn’t realize because they weren’t paid for it that it was something that was good to put on their resume.
Emily:
I think you just pointed out the big thing. A lot of people don’t want to put things on the resume that they were volun-told to do or that were in addition to their regular teaching responsibilities because they’re making the mistake of just listing their job responsibilities as a teacher. And resumes shouldn’t just be a list of a job description, especially if you’re going to a job that has a different job description. It should be a list of your key accomplishments that are relevant.
So if you’re going for a corporate training position, and I would say I have 10 examples of that where they were like, “Oh, I guess I did sit on that vertical curriculum alignment committee for the entire district, and I’m in a district that has about 55 schools and serves hundreds of thousands of students.” And that’s where I say, you know what? “We can put these numbers down on your resume to show the scope of your work. You’re not just a classroom teacher who sits and deals with 20 students and their learning, you’re making decisions at a bigger level that are affecting adult staff and that are affecting tons and tons and tons of students, and that’s an accomplishment, and we’re going to write that down and we’re going to put a number on it.”
Daphne:
Yeah, and even there are people who are probably listening who are like, well, I never did anything, quote unquote, “that impressive.” But there are ways to think about your own unique experience and how it relates to the role. For an example, when I was applying for my role at Microsoft, they were looking for someone who was tech-savvy, implemented technology into their classroom. And so my resume heavily reflected even my own personal use of, oh, I created all of my planning materials in Microsoft OneNote instead of using another type of program.
Or there were a couple times that I would sit down with just a small group of teachers after school and help them go through how to use their emails. But even with small numbers, it was so heavily relevant to that particular role that I made sure I put it on there and took off some of the non-relevant bullet points.
Emily discusses the challenges teachers face when prepping their teaching resume for the corporate world
And I think that’s also something that people really struggle with is they want to keep all of their amazing experience on their resume, even if it’s not necessarily something that has anything to do with that type of position. Do you feel like when you are doing calls with transitioning teachers, you have seen that happen with them as well where they were struggling with what to take off?
Emily:
Yes. And I think both of those instances that you talked about where someone’s not sure or can’t think of examples or is undercutting their experience and also putting too much on their resume, I think in both of those instances, I love what I do because I’m a neutral party who can come in and ask some probing questions, dig a little bit deeper, and I can also say, “Hey, this isn’t relevant to the roles that you’re looking at,” because part of that resume review session is give us a sample role because you shouldn’t be writing an all about me resume. That’s not how it works outside of education. They don’t want a jack of all traits in the corporate world. They want someone who’s really honed in on learning and development or someone who’s really honed in on customer success. We do wear a lot of hats as teachers, but we only want to put on the hat they’re asking for.
Daphne:
For that moment.
Emily:
Yeah, otherwise, think about the attention spans of everybody these days. I can’t read a LinkedIn caption that’s more than a paragraph long. Your resume needs to get cut right to the chase. So I love those calls because it’s good to have a fresh set of eyes on your resume and that set of eyes…. With my experience, I’ve spoken with hiring managers, I’ve been through the hiring process for all sorts of jobs. You will find a lot of people have a lot of opinions on resumes and you can Google advice that says do this on your resume. And then you can Google advice that says the exact opposite thing, but that’s where you have to think about your source and someone else who’s transitioning, who’s never been in a hiring position or talked to people who are in a hiring position, you’re going to want to take their advice with a grain of salt.
So I really do love to come in and do that type of things. And my favorite types of calls, and this happens all the time, is where we uncover some gem, something where the teacher forgot that they had even done this because I think we also forget all of our accomplishments because we have so many accomplishments, and I’m not trying to puff anybody up, but I really am, I’m a hype woman for everybody that I speak with, all of my clients. But for example, I’ve had people that I’ve spoken to are going towards customer success and all they’ve got on their resume is their teaching experience. And then I ask them, have you had any part-time jobs? Did you work before you became a teacher? And it comes out that they’ve worked at a very large retail chain or they’ve worked in the service industry.
And something you might not know if you’re not in a hiring capacity is sales managers like to see people with service industry experience. That’s client facing work, that’s upselling, that’s being persuasive, that’s learning about your product or your service so that you can get the customer to buy more. So people have thought, “Oh, but that’s not relevant,” or they forgot. I also feel like there’s this element of the men in black where they flashed your brain and you’ve only ever been a teacher and you forget maybe that summer that you were a coordinator for a camp program. And if you’re going for coordinator roles, you better put that back on your resume.
Daphne:
Yep. And it might be helpful to just do a brain dump. Here’s all my bullet points, here’s all my experience, and I can pick and choose which ones are more relevant to specific types of jobs. If you are trying to go for one or two different career paths, you can have one or two different variations of your resume, but then continue to jot it down and especially this school year as you are listening to this, as you’re taking on volunteer initiatives to continue to write down what you are doing, who it is impacting, what are the actual results of it, and trying to articulate why it is relevant to the types of positions you’re applying to.
Emily:
No, absolutely. And I think back to all of the ILTs or instructional leadership team meetings I was on and the PBIS committees, and I really wish that I had hung on to that data because we work like corporations in many ways as teachers. We’re on all these committees, we have all these special programs and projects, and we’re meeting throughout the year and we’re examining data at the beginning of our work. We’re setting milestones and then at the end we do sit back and reflect, but we’re just in such a state of survival mode that we don’t keep that nugget of data that shows how awesome we are, and that shows the effect of our work. So if there’s something I could say to people who are continuing this year and are going to be looking for next year is start to write those numbers down. I now have a folder in my personal email that just says wins, and I can be a bit of a disorganized person, so I just take screenshots.
If I come across, especially as I see my clients move on to really cool jobs at really cool companies, I am doing a better job of keeping all that stuff written down for myself. And I just shift it over to a folder that says wins, like when I started teaching and they would suggest make a little file folder of all the letters that you get from students where if you’re feeling down, if you’re feeling like you need some inspiration, you can open that up. So this is just the corporate version of that. If you get your review or there’s goals that you’re working on, you’ve written it down, keep it somewhere where you can highlight what makes you awesome. And we all have different aptitudes, but we all have data points that can show how awesome we are. Maybe you have learners that are struggling so they’re not meeting map growth, but if you look at the data from beginning of the year to the end of year, just in comparison to themselves, you can make that data show what you’ve done.
Daphne:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Emily:
And what positive impact you’ve had.
Daphne:
One thing I heard you say that I want to touch on a little bit and why it’s so important to really start to talk to people with hiring experience, start to get support if you are struggling with the resume writing process or with even identifying what types of careers you’re interested in, is that everyone, every teacher is their own unique person with different experience, different skills, different strengths. And I think it’s so easy for right off the bat teachers to put themselves into the same bucket as everyone generally speaking as, okay, well I heard that teachers go into instructional design, so instructional design is the right role for me. And then they realize, oh, I actually never liked this aspect or that aspect. Not every teacher has the exact same strengths or has the exact same experience.
Emily shares how one-on-one support can help transitioning teachers find confidence
Do you feel like when you’re talking to coaching clients, there are people who are a little bit following the crowd until they get that one-on-one support?
Emily:
Yes. I think that comes from a space too of that imposter syndrome and a space of lower self-esteem, of being told you’re just a teacher for years and years and years. But it’s kind of like if you’ve ever had a friend or a spouse or a partner say something really, really nice about you, and you’re like, I never thought of myself that way, and you’re almost at a loss for words of like, oh, wow, I guess I am a really kind, wonderful person. And it can be hard to see your own genius. So I think speaking to someone else who’s a neutral party, who can pull that out of you is really a good thing. And I think we all need some individual attention. We give so much individual attention to so many people. We’re givers, we like to help, we help others. So it can be really hard for us to accept help from others, but it can feel really good to get that individual attention. And yes, so I do see a lot of people say, “Well, I see that this is really popular, so I want to do that.”
And then we talk through that and talk about what the day-to-day looks like and think about what they actually like to do. Because guess what? Teachers can do tons of other things. We are very versatile. We can succeed in so many things. And what can be tough about the resume is we do marketing, we do sales, we do project management, we do editing, we do so many things so you really have to pick out the things that only you like. And I also think making a decision about what you’re going to do with your life and your career based on what other people are doing is never a good idea. You really have to start looking internally. And it can be hard to sift through that if you are in a tough situation or you’re experiencing burnout or you’re feeling really down on yourself or you’re feeling exhausted. So having somebody to help you do that is really crucial. And I’ve absolutely had calls where somebody came in saying, here are the three paths. And then they’ve left saying, here’s my one path that I didn’t even think about.
Because there’s also this aspect of teaching where we are very sheltered. I like to talk about the allegory of the cave, which is back to philosophy from college, but this idea of these people that were stuck in a cave and they just see the shadows above them. They don’t know what the outside world looks like. They just see the shadows. We’re kind of like that with other jobs, and we’re like that with the professional world. We don’t have an hour to go to the deli on the corner and talk to people from another office building or talk to people from sales or marketing or operations to get ideas of what these other jobs are like and what other people’s lives are like. So we can go next door to another teacher, but we don’t have access to that information and that networking stuff where we can learn about things that we have aptitudes in or that interest us. So it’s helpful to speak to someone who does.
Daphne:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s some parts of that that you can definitely outsource to friends and family. Say what types of strengths do you see that are unique to me? Am I highly organized? That’s not you or me, Emily. We’re not talking about us here.
Emily:
True, true, true.
Daphne:
But do we like being in front of crowds of people? Are we more comfortable talking to people? Are you more creative? Do you actually graphic design? Are you the teacher who will spend two hours creating the best PowerPoint or are you the person who really likes writing and writing extensive pieces for the students to dissect. Which parts of the actual profession are the places where you find yourself getting a little bit sucked in, even if it sounds boring? I actually do going through emails, deleting emails, doing data work and things that are technically boring, but admin types of jobs. And I did like that when it came to teaching as well. It was figuring out different ways to organize my files.
I’m not good at it, but it was something that I found myself getting absorbed in and that’s how I knew, oh, I could work in technology because I do like learning how all these different things connect and are put together, but that’s something that you’re going to have to really start digging into. And it just really is helpful to have someone who knows all the different types of paths that you are qualified for to help you really fine tune and find a direction. But this is a process that even with someone who is guiding you might take a little bit longer than you had hoped because you put this external pressure on yourself of is this going to be my forever career? But whatever your next career is going to be is something that’s just the first step in the right direction.
Emily:
Oh, absolutely. And I talk to a lot of people who are looking outside of education because they are looking for growth potential, and education is really unique in that there’s limited growth potential. And when you think about administration, that’s very, very different from teaching. And not everybody wants to do that. So the difference between teaching in the corporate world is you can grow laterally. You can go into another department, you could say, you know what? I’m a recruiter, but I’m really interested in this L and D project that’s going on. And you can ask your boss, can I pitch in 10% of my time to work on this L and D project and shift over to L and D from recruitment. And this is a true story of someone that I know. So in teaching, you can’t really do that. Once you’re out, once you’ve transitioned out, there’s this whole wide world, like you crawl out of the cave.
It’s not shadows. You see all these people, you see their day to day, you get an idea of what they’re working on and you start to realize, I have these other interests and this reminds me of something I did in teaching and a skill I used, but I didn’t even know this is something that people are using outside of education and in the corporate world. And I also like to use the example of your teacher barbecues. At the teacher barbecue where all the teachers are clustered together and then the spouses and partners are off on the other side being like, “Oh, there they go talking about teaching again. They all have jobs.” And we are often just so into our teaching lives that we’re not taking time to ask the people around us who don’t have teaching jobs, what do you do? What does your day look like? What do you like about your job? What’s the toughest part of your job? What’s the fun part of your job? It’s hard to seek that information though when you’re just in survival mode.
Daphne:
Yeah, and so many people are in survival mode, which is why it’s so rewarding to be able to create resources or to create support systems to help them make this difficult process a little bit easier. And that leads really well to my last question for you, Emily, what do you like about coaching transitioning teachers?
Emily:
That’s a really good question.
Daphne:
I put you on the spot. You had no idea.
Emily:
I know. I think I have such a deep love and respect for people that go into this profession, and I come from a long line of helpers and teachers, and there’s such a wonderful quality about people that go into this profession. And I meet a ton of incredible people who have done incredible things and given so much of themselves to others and helped other people succeed. I love being able to help them achieve their goals of life, work balance, increased income potential, increased growth potential, giving them back their time, giving them back their energy, getting them excited about something again, is really, really rewarding.
I just meet a lot of cool people who’ve done a lot of cool things, and they just need some help getting to that next step so they can live their best lives. So I’m a people person, if you can’t tell already. I’m a huge extrovert. I love talking to people and I love finding out about people and talking to them about their strengths and the things that make them beautiful and wonderful and amazing. And I get to do that through teacher career coach and bonus they’re all teachers
Daphne:
And some admin.
Emily:
Yes.
Daphne:
And some admin, some PAs.
Emily:
No, I have admin. I have social workers, counselors. If you work anywhere in or around a school, I’ve talked to somebody there and I’ve talked to people domestic, internationally. I speak to all sorts of people and what an amazing job that I get to just help people think about what makes them amazing and unique. I love it. And it reminds me of what I loved about teaching, which was all the relationships that I built with all those students and the ways that I helped them see how amazing and cool they were. And now I get to do that with the helpers. I like to help the helpers. I guess that’s a good way of putting it, but teachers give so much of themselves, I love to give them a little something back.
Daphne:
Such a great answer. And we’re just so fortunate to have you on this team and have you using all of your resources to help teachers create a plan for whatever comes next. So thank you so much for coming on, and thank you so much for being here. Just such a pleasure to talk to you anytime, Emily.
Emily:
You’re so welcome, Daphne.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
