We bring to you the top 5 career opportunities which experienced schoolteachers will have in future. These opportunities are in addition to the normal ‘teacher to principal’ hierarchy, and have been created due to the expansion and corporatization of education. We have selected these opportunities based on a survey, which we had with schools, and with the help of various job-postings in education sector.

 

Big fish in small pond

Based on our findings, this is the best opportunity, which an experienced teacher has at present. If you are working with a big, well-known brand, and you have 5+ years of experience in some particular domain, then you can easily pitch yourself for a better designation and pay-package in a new school. Though this school will be new and smaller as compared to your existing school, but your probability of getting into administrative functions is much higher. You recognition, brand value and goodwill will also increase as these schools need to show to parents (read prospective clients) that their teachers have experience of major schools. Hence, the quality will be same.

 

Knowledge retention expert

This is an awesome opportunity. If you have created a niche, then you can work with your school on a ‘knowledge retention program’. Let’s explain it in details. Suppose you are a TGT in Mathematics having more than 10 years of experience. Now, you must have observed, learned and created many best practices in teaching, which are not documented anywhere. For example, you know specific ways of teaching trigonometry and algebra, which results in better assimilation by students. These are the practices which you have learned through your experience, and cannot be found in any book.

What you have to do is to document these practices in form of content. You can work with your school to publish their own proprietary books and pay you royalty, or look for external content developers, who can do the same. Almost all professional services companies focus on knowledge retention, so that the acquired and undocumented knowledge does not go away when their employees leave them. Now, educational institutions are also adopting this practice. However, make sure that you read the agreement while entering into any such contract with your school or external publishers — as at the end, copyright ownership of the content matters.

 

Content Editor

This is another opportunity, which came up in our survey. The difference between this and previous one is that in this, you will be editing the content by others and collating it. In our survey, the schools confirmed that they encourage all their faculty members for knowledge retention, by documenting their teaching pedagogy.

However, they need one person, who is experienced enough to select the best teaching practice and delete redundancies. This person, as per the schools, is an editor. Therefore, an editor’s job — in our example — is to collate the content from all mathematics teachers, select the best one, and file it.

 

Knowledge / process auditor

There was a bit overlap in two categories of our survey, and hence we clubbed the two of them to come up with this term. A knowledge auditor is a one, who is needed to check if the right content is being taught in the right way. Different schools have different names for this role. While in some of the schools, this role is done by the headmaster/headmistress, other have a designation called ‘facilitator’ for it. A process auditor — on the other hand — is a person, who is responsible for checking all the academic, as well as non-academic processes of the schools. Schools, which are going for process certification such as ISO, generally have someone assigned this role.

Now, why is this role important? Based on our findings, demand of a knowledge/process auditor is going to increase in future, for the following reasons. One, many schools will go for ISO certifications, and will need such persons. And second, a person doing a similar job is actually supervising all the processes of a school, and is working as a virtual principal. This aspect increases his/her market value, and makes him/her ready to be absolved by upcoming schools.

 

Education Counselor

If you browse through any of the job site, you will find ample vacancies for this role. Due to growing economy and globalization, the career avenues for students are also increasing. And this calls in for a mentor, who can guide them to right path. Though the job ads demand people with psychology background for this role, but the many schools just wish if their teachers can come forward for this.

Education counseling will help you create a niche for yourself, and you can also work as an independent counselor in future. However, by taking this path, you might have to do away with your normal teaching, which in turn might affect your core competency that you have build over years.