Daphne shares the key findings from the 2025 Job Market Survey for transitioning teachers, featuring insights from 717 former educators. Learn what the data reveals about application numbers, salary trends, job security, and the most common career paths teachers are taking.
Daphne also addresses the challenges of the current job market, including hiring freezes and slower hiring paces at some companies, while emphasizing that teachers with all levels of experience (including 16+ years) are successfully transitioning.
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 today’s episode, I’m going to go over some of the top findings in the much anticipated 2025 job market survey that I created for transitioning teachers. So just to recap, back in episode 195, I shared that when I was returning back.
This was my biggest project that I’ve been focused on for a little bit over a month now. I’ve been head down in research mode, talking to hiring managers, CEOs, reading as much as I can about all the different changes that are happening in the job market in 2025. But I know that I don’t need to tell you this.
A lot of the information that’s out there, if you go to more generalized information about the job market, it’s gonna be broad and not specific to transitioning teachers. So I really wanted data that was extremely specific to. This community and I put out a call to action to have as many former teachers as possible complete the survey, and I just wanted to hear their insight into whether or not their companies are hiring, what made them stand out for the roles and if their jobs feel secure.
And this community really showed up for one another. We still had a few former teachers trickling in and doing the survey, even after I wrote this episode. But as I wrote the episode, as I did all of the, creating the document that I’m gonna share with you if you’re in our email newsletter, at that time we had 717 former teachers answer.
And that is great. It’s big enough to see quite a few strong directional patterns, but I wanna be completely transparent upfront. Some of the subcategories that I wanted to try and find trends on didn’t have enough answers to give true insight. But first, let’s go over what the data is showing us. What I was able to conclude, and some of this is not gonna be surprising to you, but it might reassure you that it’s not in in your head.
First, yes. Applications are increasing. In 2022, in 2023, respondents said that they were landing jobs around 30 applications, and in 2024 to 2025, they were reporting closer to 40 and 50 applications. And that means that you are working harder. There is a lot more effort required. That’s not going to be the exact number.
For some of you. There are some that reported over a hundred applications, and this is something that’s gonna be dependent on the jobs that you’re applying for, the strategy that you use with your resume and the job market itself. There’s just so many factors that are gonna impact this exact question, but it does look like the amount of applications has pretty much doubled from people who left in 2022 or 2023 or even before versus 2024 and 2025. Next, going into salary, we had 48% said that it was a pay increase from their role outside of the classroom. 45.5% said it was a pay decrease, and there’s about five to 6% that did not want to answer that question. But one of the biggest things that was really encouraging for me to see is that over 60%, 64.3% did say that they had received a pay increase since they left the classroom and 2022 to 2023 transitioners.
Obviously had more time to receive those raises, so the pay increases were more common in that subcategory. And that makes sense. 2024 levers and 2025 levers haven’t really been in their roles maybe potentially long enough, but this is still really good news showing that salary growth really is happening for teachers who are transitioning once they are outside of the classroom.
I know so many of you are looking for roles that are paying a higher salary, especially if you’ve been in teaching longer, you’re really looking for a role that pays 90 KA hundred K or more. And so what I found is that. Only 9% of teachers who left the classroom got 90 K or more in their initial offer, but that 64% who reported that they’ve already gotten pay increases after they left, that 9% has shifted, and now 33% of that demographic is now earning above 90 k.
On a scale of one to five, they are indicating that they are 4.25 happy in their new role, and indicated that they were 2.63 happy when they were in the classroom. So overall, it’s showing a positive trend that they’re much happier in their roles outside of the classroom.
So far from what I’m able to see, the destination roles are still remaining pretty stable.
Instructional design, project management, customer success. They’re all consistently the top types of roles that teachers are transitioning to across the years. There’s a list of 20 different titles that came up, no matter what year they transitioned, and you know that consistency is actually pretty helpful.
It means we know where to focus your efforts on. However, some of these subcategories saw differences in how they answered whether or not they felt like there was job security or the types of advice that they give to former teachers. So the market perception shifted depending on who you were, looking for answers from.
So instructional designers were far more likely to say that the market’s oversaturated, and it’s a lot higher and harder to get into, and that’s actually something that’s been pretty consistent from our experience back in 2023, it was instructional design was one of the jobs that was talked about in a way that people said it was far more competitive for former teachers.
And then those who are an ed tech. Said that they’re nervous about the budgets this year. And that’s actually something that I’ve talked to CEOs from EdTech companies about. Also, as I’m recording this, it’s October, like the first week of October, and it’ll probably be the second week of October when this actually airs.
Oh, October 9th. So this will air on October 9th. Because of budget changes many ed tech companies are going to keep whoever was on staff through the first of the year through the summer because it’s all hands on deck. It’s when it’s their busiest season. But they may have already noticed that there’s a lot of shifts in how school districts are acting, what they’re able to afford.
Federal grants that may have bought programs in the past may or be are shifting, and this could be positive or negative. But I’m just gonna focus on the negative and the hard here. There’s a potential that we see ed tech companies start to lay off usually right before the holiday break. So it might happen this month, it might happen next month, or it might not happen at all.
I’m not a fortune teller, and the people that I talked to were not planning on hiring or not planning on laying people off at their companies. It’s speculation. But there’s a good potential and this is the timeline in which that happens. Percentage wise, when I talked to former teachers, 31% of them said that their companies are hiring at the same pace as usual.
24.9% said that they’re still hiring, but it seems like it’s a little bit slower of a pace. 16% said that they’re actually in a hiring freeze. They’re not hiring currently right now. And 8% said that they are laying people off or downsizing at their company. And then 20% said that no idea, which is also very common, to not really know what’s, what’s going on on the hiring side if you’re just heads down in your work. When it came to describing their role, 40 percent of them are remote. 20% are in office and 33% are hybrid with about 5%. Preferring not to say. I know we’ve done deep dives on remote roles in the past. so make sure to go back and listen to that podcast episode if that’s something that you’re really interested in.
But just to let you know, sometimes remote roles still are very location specific, depending on. They have like the business licenses in different states. So while it might be remote, they might still require you to live in specific states. But it does show that there’s still a large chunk who are working completely remote.
Um, return to office mandates haven’t necessarily impacted as many people as you may have thought. One of the things that really surprised me was the question, how many years of experience and education did you have before you left the classroom? I assumed. That many people probably hadn’t yet vested into their salary or, were earlier on in their careers.
And so that was gonna like skew the data of, if they said they got a salary increase or decrease if they were earning less. But, 21% of the audience actually closer to 22%, uh, had been in the classroom for 16 plus years. 20% had been in the classroom 12 to 15 years, 28%, eight to 11 years, 28%, four to seven years, and only 3.5% had been in less than three years.
So that is really showing that a lot of people who have said, I’ve been in the classroom for too long, this isn’t a possibility for me. There are so many people who have done exactly what you are thinking of doing, and they’ve been able to make it work. And like the surveys shown, they have been happier in these new roles and they’ve also earned an increase in salary. The jobs that have been hired in 2025.
The roles have span from instructional design to training in L and D to project or program management, to customer success to sales B-D-R-S-D-R. There’s been those in talent and HR operations admin. So the variety here is really encouraging. There isn’t just one single neuropath forward and the reported salaries really vary widely from mid $40,000 pay to up to $100,000.
Pay and ld, learning and development and management roles. The most common categories for 2025 hires were instructional design and project program management. There wasn’t a significant amount of difference when it came to salaries, whether or not they were working remotely. So remote work itself wasn’t necessarily paid lower, which is great news for those of you who are looking for remote work.
One of the questions that’s a great question that so many people have asked me from this audience is, you know, what state do they live in? Do they live in a high cost of living state? Is that impacting their salaries? Is that why they’re getting offered these higher salaries? And I was able to conclude from all of our answers, yes, and that might not be what you necessarily want to hear, but it’s more important to have that information upfront so that you, um.
I have an honest answer from me. I never had asked where they were living before. Mostly we just had job titles and we had, like what their salary was. But the teachers who landed jobs in high cost of living states like California, New York, New Jersey, DC, Washington, um, Colorado, Oregon, Hawaii, they generally reported higher salaries
then peers who lived in lower cost of living states, it’s not always set in stone that way. There are many people who lived in lower cost of living states who still had really high salaries. But overall it, it was a trend and it was something that I think that I should report because it’s a big question that many of you were asking.
There were different things that might be contributing to this. One, you know, there’s the local salary norms. There’s a higher concentration of tech where ed tech headquarters in these higher cost of living areas, and they might be competing with others. On salaries trying to get the best talent for their specific company.
And there’s also in those types of roles, more mid to senior types of roles available. And that’s what was impacting overall how the former teachers were getting paid. So I was going into the subcategories, like special education teachers or high school teachers versus elementary teachers and trying to see if there was.
Clear patterns on where they would land as far as former teachers go. And that’s where it started to be a little bit murkier on whether or not we could say like with confidence, because it wasn’t a large enough category of answers. But here’s just some early signals that we found a lot of special education teachers ended up going into like case management or customer success roles.
And high school teachers actually went into a lot of data roles or sales roles. But I would just treat these as like an interesting pattern and not something that had like a clear overall trend just because when you split it into the sub groups, the sample for each slice really started to shrink and the dataset just really wasn’t deep enough to see a lot of big differences.
One of the biggest, most reoccurring themes throughout all of the years, but especially in 2025, was all of the former teachers when I asked them how to stand out, was to make sure that you are translating your teaching into more corporate language for your resume. Make sure that you show metrics to prove that you are able to do the specific things that are on your, bullet points inside of your resume and make sure that you are networking.
And these are all things that we teach in the Teacher Career Coach course. It’s all things that I’ve talked about in the Teacher Career Coach newsletter. We have deep dives. All over this podcast on these specific topics. So please go back, scroll all the way back to episode two and start to look at the topics that you want deep dives on because we have covered so many of these topics.
Now this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter episode because as I started to write out the podcast, I realized that just going over the stats is gonna be kind of dense to listen to and that it’s gonna be a better experience if you read it via email and you look at like a graphic that I’ve created. But also, I have to acknowledge that this was really hard for me to write and talk about in the way that I did because behind every single data point is a real person who has real hopes and real frustrations. So I don’t wanna like minimize it down to, well, the majority are happier in their new role, or the majority are feeling this way or that way, or have this salary increase? Because, you know, if 99% of you got hired in your absolute dream job, I’d still be bummed for the 1% until you got your one. Yes. And I also, I don’t want to gloss over all of the data that we just went through without acknowledging that while some of it is optimistic, it’s still really okay to be upset about this job market. This job market sucks it. This is a really hard time for you to be a career transition and. it’s not just you. There’s, parts of the survey that absolutely say it’s harder right now, and that you’re gonna be up against a bigger amount of candidates.
There’s going to be like different types of challenges that you may be facing, and if that is discouraging to you, I completely understand. You are not failing because you’re not super excited right now. Like the landscape has shifted and it’s okay to have a good amount of time spent in the big feeling stage right now.
Here is what I can tell you since I started this in 2019, every single one of these former teachers was facing an uphill battle in 2019, the biggest struggle, and even in 2020, maybe even 2021, the biggest struggle was that hiring managers did not hire for former teachers. Like quote unquote, they did not hire former teachers.
Was the, the biggest mindset challenge because teachers hadn’t really left in the amount that they had in the past. There was just kind of a stigma. There were hiring managers that said, sorry, we are not gonna take a teacher from the classroom. And that there was job descriptions that even said like, we’re not hiring, former teachers for this role.
That is something that really changed and we were able to, I was able to be in the Wall Street Journal and talk to them. We were interviewed as, here’s all the places where corporations are hiring former teachers, because a Wall Street Journal didn’t, had no one to talk to at that time. The journalist reached out to me.
We had multiple articles on it about what companies were hiring former teachers and where former teachers could go. I talked to hiring managers at some of the biggest. Tech companies that you absolutely have heard of and help them understand which of their open roles would be great fits for different types of teachers, what types of teaching roles would translate better.
I really was able to like act as a liaison during that time. But now there are all of these other former teachers spread out across all of these different companies who are advocating for you. There are companies that know how great former teachers can be and what a great asset they can bring to their table.
So that is something that is shifting. Your timeline is not within your control, and that’s not something I’ve ever really been able to promise. But there are factors that you can control right now, and what I am going to do on this podcast and our newsletters inside the Teacher Career Coach course is I’m going to give you every possible advantage that I can, the clearest strategies, the most practical tools, the strongest support that I can provide.
I’m gonna continue to send newsletters every Saturday, which I really strongly encourage you to read if you are not already in the Teacher Career Coach course. I don’t believe that staying frozen is the answer. If a career changes truly what you want, there are still places that are hiring. There are still former teachers who are getting hired, and eventually you will stand out.
You will get your foot in the door. Eventually, the tide might change and jobs will start to open up and you wanna be ready and prepared if this is what you want for your long-term future. So we are going to tackle this together one step at a time. But if you want to see the entire job market survey, go to www teacher career coach.com/job market 2025.
That’s where you can sign up to get the download. That’s teacher career coach.com/job market 2025. It’s gonna have information that I didn’t go over. I know this was kind of dense with a ton of like. Stats. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Teacher Career Coach podcast. If you are finding our podcast episodes helpful, please let us know.
You can either leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can shoot us a DM on Instagram, leave a comment somewhere. It just really helps me gauge where we are putting the most effort. And what has been the most helpful for you in your transition? So thank you so much for being here, and we’ll see you on next week’s 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.
