In this episode, Daphne talks to former French and Spanish teacher, Elizabeth Hill who now works as an eLearning developer creating language learning materials for adults in the business world. Listen in as she shares her story to help inspire teachers who want to leave education to find work that makes them feel happy and appreciated.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
From Teacher to E-Learning Developer
Daphne:
Hi Elizabeth. Thank you so much for being here today.
Elizabeth:
Hi, Daphne. Thank you so much for having me.
Daphne:
I am really excited to get into what you are doing outside of the classroom, but I always start off the podcast by asking a little bit about your experience in education and you actually have a little bit of a different background than a traditional K through 12 teacher.
Elizabeth:
I have a bachelor’s degree in French and was able to teach in France for a year after college. I came home and did my student teaching and then I taught for eight years in public schools and I was also lucky enough to be certified in Spanish, so I was teaching French and Spanish. And then on and off through that period, I’ve also worked with adults through The Alliance française, which is a French club for adults, and I decided to leave last February. So I’ve been at my new job for about 10, 11 months now.
Daphne:
What stage of your teaching career did you really start to evaluate other roles outside of the classroom?
Elizabeth:
So it wasn’t really anything that I considered until maybe November of last year, actually it would’ve been November 2021. So we made it through all the COVID times and I was still teaching at some points fully remote and at other points it was remotely and with students in front of me at the same time. And then finally with all the students back. And that 2021, 2022 school year actually started off really positive and I was feeling really happy to be back with my students doing what I loved. And then there was just kind of this crash that happened in October, November and the students were so burnt out, I was so burnt out. Behavior was not good, motivation was not good, and I was just feeling like when I was teaching that there wasn’t time to do my job at my job, that I was teaching five, sometimes six classes a day with multiple preps and lots of emotional issues between students and just dealing with all of that felt like, cool, I just did that for eight hours and now I have to get ready for tomorrow.
I just wish I had time within my day to do my stuff, to do my work. And I was looking around at people I knew and I was like, oh my gosh, some people just go to work and sit down and they’re like, what are we doing today? Or they’re just able to go to work and have that eight or nine hours be their job and then they leave it and they’re not up half the night wondering, did I say the right thing with that student? Did I do the right thing? Am I ready for tomorrow? What if the copier breaks when I arrive? I could just never get there early enough or stay late enough to get all of it done. And I was seeing people working remotely and I thought that could be me, I could do that.
Daphne:
Yeah, and what’s interesting is I don’t know you, we just met right before this podcast interview. Right off the bat, I feel like I can make the assumption that you’re a little bit of an overachiever, but still this was not a sustainable career for you.
Elizabeth discusses her time in the classroom and what led her to leave
Elizabeth:
Yeah. I mean, I was a straight A student. I have a master’s degree, I forgot to mention that part, I did my master’s in French as well. You don’t learn two foreign languages and not be super type A. So I was a perfectionist and I think that was part of the problem with teaching was that everything had to be so good all the time. But I was also sort of starting to let go of that. I mean, I was working at a really cool urban school that had an environmental focus. So there was this DEI aspect that teaching that was really interesting to me and felt really good, and I was trying to let go of that feeling of perfectionism and wanting everything to be so great all the time to accommodate students and meet them where they’re at.
But it was just so hard and that was actually taking a big toll on me too, is because I had to almost become a different person and my priorities had to change, and all of that work was on me. If I was unhappy and I had great bosses too. But the message often is to teachers that if there’s a problem, it’s your fault and if you’re unhappy, it’s your fault.
Daphne:
And what solution can you make to figure it out? What do you need to implement? And it’s not how other careers are run. Other careers you’re able to say, hey, look, I’m going to put out a bullet point of here’s 50 things that you’ve told me need to be done by the end of this month, it’s not a reasonable amount of work, so let’s figure out who can I delegate some of these responsibilities to? And most, not all, but most jobs are able to say, thanks so much for putting this together, that’s really helpful, and it helps us understand what you have on your plate. Where teachers is like, okay, we see this, what are you going to do to be creative?
And this is what the students need from you, and that’s the end of it. And it’s tragic what is happening to so many people right now, but it is not unique and it happens to overachievers and straight A students and people with masters, that never probably anticipated burning out in this way in this career. When you started looking for new roles outside of the classroom, what were your first steps there?
Elizabeth:
So I had an exit plan, again, very type A. But included in that was just talking to a lot of people about other things that I might be able to do, just getting it out in the open, obviously not with my coworkers or my students because that would be disastrous, but I remember I was at my husband’s holiday work party, what do you? Do you like it? Are there openings? How much do you make? People are having these conversations, I think at least in our generation, and they’re happy to share. Part of my motivation for doing that I think was to make connections, but also I feel like sometimes we’re in these echo chambers and we know that a lot of teachers are struggling and we know that there are all these problems. But especially a couple years ago, I feel like so many people just don’t get it and don’t know.
And so that was part of my thing too is I need people to know what this feels like. I’m not a wimp, I’m not someone who’s afraid of hard work and this is killing me. And so I just started talking to a lot of people about it. I had a list of about five people that I had worked for in various capacities. I was a research assistant in college. I had some good connections at Middlebury College where I did my master’s and I just started sending out some emails saying, hey, I think I want out, I’m looking, will you keep me in mind? And it ended up that I found a job fairly quickly, and so I didn’t need to rely on any of those connections, but having that kind of short list of games was really great. And listening to your podcast of course was a huge game changer for me.
I got to be part of a Facebook group called Leave Teaching and Smile where people were just sharing these stories of how their lives were so much better. I mean, I never saw anything about people being like, oh, I miss teaching, I’m going to go back. And so finding that community online through Teacher Career Coach and Leave Teaching and Smile, just talking to people and also getting my resume together, thinking about what skills I had and starting that job search.
Daphne:
I feel like that was the piece that was missing when I started this community because when I looked around for my own career change, nobody was talking about it and no one would talk to me about it. No one would acknowledge that what I was doing was the right thing or something that people did until I was on the other side. And then it was like, oh, here’s all these other former teachers who work at these really big Ed tech companies that you work for in a variety of roles. But there wasn’t an online community of, hey, how do I talk about this judgment free? And it was pre-pandemic, but I felt like that community piece is the biggest piece to feel like one, you’re not losing it, you’re not overreacting or just I think the default is that people are worried that the grass isn’t going to be greener on the other side, and then it’s just all in their head and that they’re not tough enough to make it.
But we’re highly educated and really amazing assets to companies. It’s just the way that teaching is set up right now is not sustainable and it’s going to burn out a lot of people unless there are big changes. So I feel like finding that community really reinforces the idea of this is okay, this is normal and I’m not alone in my feelings. And then also working with people is just such a great game changer. So it sounds like you found your job really quickly in your new position. Did you rewrite your resume?
Elizabeth explains how she prepped her resume for a position outside of the classroom
How did you find that job so quickly?
Elizabeth:
I did do some work on my resume. Like I said, I had this game plan and the plan further down the line was potentially going to be paying someone on Upwork or some other service to rewrite things in a more non-education field friendly way, in a more corporate way. So I ended up not having to do that, but I did listen to your podcast about rewriting resumes and changing some of the language. And I think that’s such a big piece of this. So many people don’t realize that your resume isn’t being read by a human, that you need to have the right words that are from the job search. And so that’s a huge thing that I feel like so many teachers are like, oh, but I have all this experience, won’t they see that? And they literally won’t because it’s a computer.
Daphne:
But on top of that, to add to it, there is a human that’s going to see it after that.
Elizabeth:
Yes.
Daphne:
And so I always want to tell you to be as cautious as possible because I heard you say that you almost went to Upwork. There are plenty of people on LinkedIn or Upwork that are starting to not only sell resumes, but resumes specifically for teachers in transition. And obviously we do that on our team as well. We have a resume writer in-house, we have the Teacher Career Coach course, but if you’re looking at it, you want someone with direct experience that you can tell that they have experience hiring because there are plenty of people who are making it up and figuring it out. And a human being who is a hiring manager is going to see that as hot garbage also. So even if they can say it’s an ATS friendly resume, if it does not make sense, if it does not actually translate into the role in front of you, a hiring manager is going to see that as well.
Elizabeth:
Definitely. Yeah, you’re absolutely right to point that out. So another thing that I was thinking about in November, December, January was just doing really quick applications. And I knew that I had spent all this time getting a master’s in French, and so I was just looking for any job that required French. And if the application took me more than 15 minutes, I said no. And the application that ended up resulting in the job probably took me again 15 minutes, and it was 10 questions about your cultural experiences, your language skills, how you feel about how people should learn languages, it was very personalized. And so I was able to show what I was thinking, and I really appreciated that my company offered that kind of application. But I also know that so many jobs ask you to submit a portfolio and all of this stuff, and that can be a huge drain on your time that teachers just don’t have. So I would say, especially in the beginning, if you can just find quick applications while also making sure that you’re doing it correctly, that’s important too.
Daphne:
Yeah, there’s a couple of different fields that are very firm on you should probably have a portfolio, and then there are others that are more open to people just going through the regular application process. So you are an eLearning developer, and I know instructional design is very portfolio heavy unless you have your foot in the door or you specifically have something in your background that translates into the role. I had an interview with a former teacher who’s an instructional designer working for the fire department, and she used her science background to actually leverage into a role that she didn’t need to show her portfolio on using eLearning tools. But it sounds like you did the exact same thing. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your resume though, because what I already jotted down as very impressive is that you not only were doing teaching and not only had multiple languages, but you also were teaching adults on the side. Did you make sure to highlight that in your resume for this role?
Elizabeth:
Yeah. I had taught middle school for a couple of those eight years. So saying that I had worked with people ages 12 to 90. I mean, I have really old students in the alliance process, but yeah, talking about the range of ages I had worked with and also really capitalizing on that COVID remote teaching experience because in the district where I was working, the students were not required to turn their cameras on. So I actually had to flip things and make it so that I could have them do things that I could have them log into a game and see who’s in the game and who’s not, and who responded to all the questions. And since the role was for eLearning all asynchronous, that was a perfect fit because I am creating games and videos, and there was even a time during the lockdown where they hadn’t distributed all of the computers, so it literally was asynchronous.
And I would make a video of myself giving the lesson, and I would embed questions and make sure that they were forms that they could fill out. So I’m sure lots of teachers did that, and that should absolutely go into your resume of all the stuff that you did to make sure that your students could work remotely and it was completely different and you had to learn it overnight. So just pointing out how adaptable I was and how I discovered all these programs, and I actually really liked teaching that way, and that became a big part of my interview strategy.
Elizabeth’s day-to-day as an e-learning developer
Daphne:
So let’s talk a little bit more about what your actual role and what your day-to-day looks like. Do you mind sharing, for everybody listening, what is your job title and what does that even mean?
Elizabeth:
Sure. So I’m an eLearning developer at a language company that focuses on language for business. So we have large corporate contracts with companies that need their employees to learn a language. The strategy is entirely immersion based, so there is no English or Japanese on the page. And since French is my main language, I’m mostly creating business French lessons that are entirely in French. So for some people they’re starting on day one and we need to figure out a way to teach them French, entirely in French. I’m creating videos, editing videos, selecting the images, writing activities, editing activities, everything that you see on the page is what the eLearning developers, and we also have some designers on our team. So everything that you see, it’s like Duolingo, it’s not Duolingo, but everything that you see in front of you to learn the language asynchronously is what I do.
Daphne:
It sounds like you work mostly in video editing and not as much in an eLearning authoring tool. So for video editing, is that something that you came with an experience actually creating videos, editing them prior to this role? Or is it something that you’re able to fine tune as you’re working in it?
Elizabeth:
So a lot of the work that I do is on an LMSA learning management tool. That aspect of it feels like being an editor. I’m making sure that the questions make sense, that it looks attractive, and then there is this video component, and I learned all of that on the job. I had never opened Premier Pro before I started, but for our last project that just ended last month, I edited about 800 videos.
Daphne:
Oh, wow.
Elizabeth:
So you learn quick and it’s exciting and I feel like that’s a skill that could help me potentially move to other positions or it’s just a really great skill to have in my back pocket.
Daphne:
And for people who are listening right now, that Adobe Premier Pro is it’s a little bit harder to learn and a little bit more expensive, but if you are looking to add video editing onto your portfolio or just onto your resume that you understand video editing, one of the ones that I found is a little bit easier to learn right off the bat is Camtasia. And I’ll just have a link at teachercareercoach.com/camtasia and learning at least one of the tools and being able to say, oh, I’ve learned this tool, and it can translate into whatever they’re using on their site as well, if that’s something that’s a prerequisite to apply.
Elizabeth:
Yeah, definitely.
Daphne:
Did you have to learn anything about graphic design prior or is there an in-house team that does the graphic design? Just interested as far as how it looks aesthetically?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, a lot of our work is done by freelancers. So we have writers that come in and we outsource a lot of the graphic design and things like that. But I have learned some Photoshop because there’s thousands and thousands of photos that go into our programs and sometimes we need to tweak those. So I’ve also been able to learn some audio editing skills and probably one of the coolest things that I got to do this summer was work with recording studio that had French speakers from all over the world. And so I was supporting them and making sure that the lines were being read at the right speed and the right intonation, and then taking all that audio and making sure that it ended up in the right place so that we could make animations. We have these things called tree branching scenarios where you can interact with characters and you choose your responses in the language. So just getting to know people from all over the francophone world and then also learning these tech skills to put all that in action was really neat.
Daphne:
So it sounds like you’re wearing a lot of hats, and I know that companies basically make job titles that make sense for them for the roles in front of them. Have you looked, do most companies call what you are doing, eLearning developer, or could this even be an instructional design role?
Elizabeth:
I feel like it could be an instructional design role, but the impression I got from some companies job postings was that you did need some qualification for scope and sequence or some experience doing scope and sequence work, which I am doing now. But some people that do work more on the design side of things have completed not even necessarily degree programs, but online certificates in that type of thing. But I definitely feel like I could take the experience I’ve gotten in this developer position and probably apply for instructional design jobs just based on that. But I do know it can be hard to jump from teaching to instructional design, but I have seen a lot of online programs that you can complete that are fairly quick.
Daphne:
Yeah, I got an instructional design role without formal experience, but I had also taught myself how to do video editing, and I was able to show a portfolio and I was already working at another Ed tech company, so I had my foot in the door. As far as learning just how other companies run, it’s going to vary from place to place of who works with the instructional designers, who works with the eLearning developers. It could be even called a learning manager, which sometimes that’s someone who just does in-house trainings or sometimes it’s just their term for we need someone to manage the learning experience for the customer, which it’s not as intuitive and it doesn’t always translate as the exact same job on every single company’s website when you start to look into it. When you got into this role, sounds like you’ve been there for a little while. How’s your work-life balance now?
Elizabeth:
It’s so much better. It’s essentially a nine to five. I mean, I start sometimes at 8:30, I can start at 8:00 if I need to end at 4:00. So there is some wiggle room in there, but I’ve never worked a minute past five. And when the day is done, the day is done. I’m not saying like, oh, I’m done with this, but I have to do these other things, I’m not still thinking about it the way I was with teaching. So this has given me the chance to do so many things after work and just have a really nice life doing things outside. I mean, I play a trivia team once a week and I still tutor. I teach adults still. So just having things outside of the home when you work from home I think is really important and I feel like I have so much more energy in the evenings to do things that I enjoy.
Elizabeth shares paths for career growth as an e-learning developer
Daphne:
Yeah, I love that. And then with this company, do you see a clear career path or upward trajectory that you could work on if you wanted to continue to grow past this role?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, maybe the tricky thing about that is that the next step-up would be being a manager, which is an entirely different set of skills, but I think teachers do make good managers, and I think this company is a really good fit for me because it allows me to use these languages that I love and it feels like teaching, but it’s not teaching and it’s just kind of the right balance of being able to do what I’m good at and also have the life that I want.
Daphne:
I heard you say that it felt like teaching, but it’s not teaching. Was that something that you were really afraid of walking away from? Was that feeling of being able to teach?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, I think it was just a big part of who I was, and I even went to therapy for part of the process of undoing that and looking for work and saying maybe I don’t have to be a teacher. But like I said, I still work with adults, I still tutor, so I get to scratch that itch and I really like making things. And that was a thing that I enjoyed when I was teaching. I mean, I was always making my own materials and that was really enjoyable, but then I would have to actually teach it and I was like, this is exhausting doing both. What if I could just do one?
Daphne:
I don’t know if you’ve listened to my past interview with Bonnie Hanks, she’s a front end software engineer, but we were talking about she was going into the next step looking at curriculum writing because she’s like, is that what I like? She was trying to figure out what it was that she likes, and we had this really great conversation where I’ve read some career coaching books where there’s these different types of sections of people, and curriculum writing is more like you love words or editing and really just staring at words. But I think what she was missing was that she actually liked building. And it sounds like you like building.
I really like building, I like automations. I get really excited about tact tools and how they all talk to one another, and I actually get drained by staring at words for too long. But it’s hard for us to realize until we start learning more about ourselves, what it was that we really truly loved about it. So you like creating learning experiences and helping people, but not necessarily all of the other being in front of people nonstop, or what is it that you think that you disliked about teaching that you didn’t realize?
Elizabeth:
The constantly being on was a lot. Feeling like you can’t have a bad day or that you can’t react like a human sometimes, and that if you did, you were punished for it. And like I said, I worked in a mostly supportive environment. I loved my colleagues, and I still just felt like everything was my fault and I was just carrying this huge weight and that I couldn’t be a human, you have to be superhuman.
Daphne:
I haven’t heard someone state it like that for a while, and it’s like a punch to the gut, that is 100% accurate is you are not allowed to make a mistake or have grace because it’s children. Children’s going to float over whether or not you graded this paper perfectly. Like, oh, this child, their future’s ruined because you didn’t go above and beyond with whatever your extra project-based learning activity was going to be. If you just like, oh, that was an off week and I just stuck to normal curriculum and I didn’t really put as much effort in creating this highly engaging lesson, then I’m the bad guy.
Elizabeth:
Yeah. And maybe that would fly if we pay teachers a $100,000 a year, but we don’t. And to make this jump to a job where the hours are very clear, I get to walk my dog for an hour at lunch and I’m going to make $22,000 more, it’s really hard to say no to that. I just think it’s so sad that these jobs that are high impact, whether it be nursing or teaching, that there’s high impact in the sense that you’re making a huge difference, but it’s high impact on you and you pay the price. And it’s all the money that you’re not making and all the hours that you stay awake at night and put in after school, and I wish we could insulate teachers from that so that they could just do the good work that they do and have less of a burden, but it seems like they just get more and more and more.
Daphne:
Yeah, I 100% agree. I hope that changes around the horizon with how bad things have gotten. I’m hoping that this is the moment that people are paying attention and they’re trying to figure out a solution, but I know it’s not going to be an overnight solution, and I know many teachers are going to have to leave until it is a full solution, and that’s not something that’s going to be able to happen within a month because it’s too complex of a problem.
What Elizabeth learned about herself through the transition process
I’d love to finish the interview with my favorite question to ask former teachers, which is what did you learn about yourself during this process?
Elizabeth:
I think I learned that I deserved to be happy and I deserve to be fulfilled and that there are lots of ways to do good in the world and also take care of yourself. I hope that if you’re listening and you’re still in teaching and you’re unsure if you want to leave, you deserve a good life. And if you have to leave teaching to do that, you should, because there’s so many opportunities, especially post-COVID thinking about so much remote work and finding things online. I mean, 10 years ago we would’ve never been able to do what we’re doing now. So I think if you do leave, you won’t regret it. But I also really respect that your podcast helps teachers stay in that want to stay in. And I think that the bottom line is you deserve to be happy and to have a good life, whether that’s in teaching or out of teaching, and everybody needs to make the changes that they need to make to find that. And it looks different for different people.
Daphne:
I couldn’t agree more. It’s just so hard to realize that we are worthy of making changes to make us happy instead of putting other people first. Because I think a lot of our self-worth lies on the fact that we’re helping other people. That’s how we feel valuable as human beings, is how helpful can I be? That’s my self-worth. And so taking that part away and realizing I’m worthy of putting myself first, I’m just a good human and I get to do this as something that everybody needs to hear, whatever that means. If it’s setting boundaries, if it’s changing jobs and you’re capable of doing it. And Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on the show. I am so happy for you. This is such a perfect job. When I looked at your resume and your former teacher experience in this job, I was like, ah, she found the best one for her. So I’m just so excited to hear where you go and what you do with this. And thank you so much for coming on and sharing.
Elizabeth:
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for all the work that you do to support teachers in and out of teaching. And I can honestly say that your podcast and your materials made a huge difference for me. So thank you so much.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Teacher Career Coach Podcast Episodes 72 and 73
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course
