When I left teaching for corporate work, one of the strangest things was how slowly I was allowed to start.
I remember thinking: You mean I wait until I have everything I need before I start doing the work?
Wait for the laptop, then access to systems then orientation. You mean I get to sit and focus on the orientation without any distractions and then get time to learn the organization? And then there was this thing called ramping up.
I had weeks to figure things out.
Coming from teaching, this was bizarre because in teaching, the students show up and you become the teacher. There is no ramp-up period.
In fact, there is usually a week or two of teacher in-service where they fill up your time with meetings, new rules and procedures, and convocation (Texas teachers have nightmares about this) instead of giving you time to prepare your lessons and classroom for the students.
Should we call this anti-ramp-up? Ramp-down? … I digress.
On day one, I needed a lesson ready. I needed to manage a classroom and figure out which students had IEPs and what accommodations they needed. There were parents to communicate with, school policies to learn, testing schedules, meetings, grading, attendance, and a hundred little things happening around a school that I didn't even know I didn't know.
And while I was figuring all of that out, the students kept coming back every morning.
That's one of the biggest differences I would want someone coming from corporate to understand about teaching:
You may be learning the job while already being completely responsible for doing the job.
When someone says “curriculum,” ask what they mean
I was reminded of this recently when I came across a Reddit post from a graphic designer who had accepted a position teaching graphics and visual communications.
She was excited about it. She'd spent years working in her field and saw teaching as an opportunity to use that experience in a different way.
During the hiring process, she repeatedly asked about the curriculum and was told it was coming.
The day before students arrived, she finally got access and found what was essentially a few months of old assignments.
Suddenly she wasn't just responsible for teaching graphic design. She needed to figure out what she was going to teach while learning everything else that comes with being a new teacher.
She walked away.
Should she have stayed? What struck me was how late she discovered what the job was actually going to require.
And that's something I'd encourage any career changer to ask about.
If a school tells you there's a curriculum, what does that mean?
Is there a full curriculum with lessons and materials? A pacing guide? Textbooks? Previous teachers' resources? Just the state standards?
The visible part of teaching isn't the whole job
From outside the profession, teaching can look like the part that happens in front of students.
While that's certainly the heart of it, there's a lot more happening around it.
You have to know what you're teaching and manage your classroom so you can actually teach, while navigating all the other things that come with teaching: grading, communicating with parents, IEPs, cell phone policies, resources, and whatever happens in the room that day.
And then you get ready to do it again tomorrow.
Especially during your first year, that can mean a lot of building while you're also trying to learn the profession.
Over time, you get better. But your first year may feel like a roller-coaster ride.
That's worth knowing before you make that switch.
There are things I miss about it, too
I don't want this to sound like a warning against teaching.
There are things about teaching that corporate work has made me appreciate even more.
Teaching is incredibly immediate. You try to explain something, and the faces in front of you tell you very quickly whether it's working. A kid who didn't understand something yesterday finally gets it today. A lesson completely bombs, and you change it for the next class.
You get to know your students and watch them grow.
There can be a very direct connection between what you did and who it helped.
I miss that.
But that's exactly why I think it's important not to romanticize either world.
Teaching isn't simply corporate work with more meaning and summers off. And corporate work isn't simply teaching with better pay and fewer children. They are very different ways of working.
So if you've spent years in corporate and teaching has started tugging at you, I'd begin by getting curious about the actual job.
Ask teachers what their days look like. Volunteer in a classroom. Observe a teacher. Become a substitute teacher for a season and try to observe different classrooms.
Ask teachers at different schools and different grade levels questions, because their answers may be very different.
And then ask yourself:
Knowing all of that, am I still curious?
If the answer is yes, keep exploring.
If the answer is no, that's useful too.
That's the whole point of considering it.