You’ve spent years earning your degree in teaching or education. You’ve studied hard, put in the hours, and learned a lot.
But now you’ve graduated (or are just about to) and all of a sudden, the thought hits you like a ton of bricks: What if I don’t want to spend all day standing in front of a classroom?
Maybe you’ve decided that a career in education isn’t for you. Maybe you just want to take a look around and explore your options a little. But either way, rest assured — you’re not locked into any one job path.
In fact, your training in teaching can be a valuable asset in any number of roles. The ability to communicate clearly, synthesize or explain information — and dare we say, educate an audience — is as essential to success in the business world as it is to life in academia.
Of course, most students who have graduated with education degrees do go on to work as teachers, at least for a while. But we’ve reviewed job listings posted on GradAustralia to get a sense of which non-education career opportunities might typically be open to grads who studied teaching.
Many major employers offer general graduate programs that will hire smart, capable grads regardless of their particular area of study. But we’ll go a little more in-depth and share some specific roles with you below, along with our thoughts on how your background will help you thrive in each.
We’ll also incorporate our best estimates of your expected salary range, based on our surveys of thousands of recent graduates of Australian universities, and suggest well-regarded employers who may be hiring grads for some of the positions we explore.
We hope you’ll find all this helpful. Let’s begin!
Now, the truth is that if you can handle a classroom full of unruly students, there is little you can’t do. That being said, we’ve come up with a list of five intriguing options (based on job listings specifically mentioning an education background) that are also highly in demand from employers.
In other words, if you want one of these jobs, you may well be able to get one. Here’s our list:
We’ll go through each role in order to give you the rundown. We’ll also suggest some top employers who may be hiring for these or similar roles.
Why would a teacher end up in marketing (or business development, which is the fashionable title for a joint marketing-sales department within a company)? Because a huge part of marketing is about education.
As a marketer, your job is to persuade your audience to buy your company’s (or your client’s) product or service. But unless you’re an incredibly well-known brand, like, say, Coca-Cola, you’re usually going to have to educate your prospective buyers on why they need what you’re selling.
This is especially important in business-to-business marketing. While individual people may often make buying decisions based on impulse, corporate purchases — like software, supplies, and equipment — are almost always the result of a much longer, more thought-out process.
You need to create marketing materials that can attract and then inform multiple levels of decision-makers within a single organisation. Who better than a teacher to do that?
Based on our survey data, you can expect to see a starting salary for an entry-level marketing position range from roughly $60,000-$70,000. However, work to develop your skill set and you can quickly find yourself contributing significantly more value — and paid accordingly.
These companies have a great reputation with grads and are often hiring for marketing roles.
Now, like marketing, you probably don’t associate teaching with working someplace like McKinsey or Deloitte. But if you genuinely enjoy coming up with creative solutions to problems and then showing others how to implement them, you may want to take a look at management consulting.
After all, management consultants do a lot of teaching! Consultants typically work for a consulting firm that is hired by other companies to help them improve their operations or provide fresh ideas and strategic thinking.
What this usually means in practice is that a team of management consultants will assess how a client’s business is currently dealing with a problem, make recommendations on how to handle it more effectively, and then help their client put those recommendations into effect. While this involves lots of looking at data and writing reports, there is also a significant hands-on piece of the job — both listening to and educating a client’s team.
As a management consultant, you can expect to spend time giving presentations to groups of your client’s team members, answering questions, and discussing ideas. Here, the communication skills you learned at university will be invaluable. After all, your consulting team won’t be able to deliver results for your clients if you can’t clearly explain your recommendations.
Starting salaries in the management consulting field can be low (although major firms tend to pay better). You may make the industry average of just $61,981. However, stick around, do well, and you can expect to see your compensation rise dramatically over time.
Each of them is ranked on our Top 100 Employers list.
Human resources (or ‘HR’ for short) is the underappreciated glue that holds major companies together. HR deals with everything from hiring to company culture to employee training, which means that skilled HR reps often need to be comfortable wearing many hats.
Much like teachers.
Working in HR, a big chunk of your role could involve training your fellow employees in everything from your company’s employee handbook to specific policies addressing more serious issues like sexual harassment and workplace bullying. To succeed, you’d need the ability to communicate important information in a compelling way and navigate what can be uncomfortable topics with deftness and even a little humour — qualities that great educators tend to possess.
If your position is more focused on recruiting, your teaching qualifications would serve you well there, too. Part of successfully convincing top talent to join your company is being able to educate them on why they’d benefit from doing so (or, if you're working for a recruiting firm, educate companies on why they should hire your talent). This may be more of a one-on-one tutorial than a large lecture, but is essential to growing and maintaining a successful business.
HR roles can pay quite well. Based on our data, the average starting salary for those working in recruiting or HR is $75,455 — one of the highest in any sector.
As does any established firm, of course, but these four rank near the top of our list of the top 100 Australian employers.
If you’ve decided you find the thought of running a classroom offputting but still want to work with students, you should consider becoming a school counsellor.
School counsellors typically work in secondary schools and do everything from advising students on where to apply to university to providing one-on-one counselling when a student is struggling academically or with a problem in their personal life. Depending on the nature of your position, you may spend half your day helping students fill out admissions paperwork and the other half talking with students who have been kicked out of class for bad behaviour or are falling behind academically.
This is a job that gives you the ability to play a genuinely positive role in the lives of the young adults you serve. Ideally, a school counsellor is a trusted figure who students know they can come to for advice or to talk about something they may not feel comfortable sharing with their friends or parents. If you can provide that sort of safe space, you can help a lot of people.
Now, you already know this, but you’re not going to get rich working in education. The average starting salary isn’t bad — $65,018 per our survey data — but you won’t see the sort of growth curve on your salary that you would for certain corporate roles. Your payoff is the satisfaction of taking care of your community and making an impact that can’t be quantified in dollars.
(We should note that depending on your exact role and employer, you may need additional training or certification in order to serve as a counsellor. This could involve anything from a short continuing education course to a master’s degree.)
Any of these may be hiring for counselling positions.
If you pursued an education degree because you love to study, then you might do well as a business analyst. The job is essentially about studying performance — of an individual business, a sector, or the market as a whole — and making predictions, assessments and recommendations for improvement.
Business analysts share some similarities with management consultants, but tend to be less hands-on and more focused on writing reports or white papers. Some analysts, for example, will pay close attention to the stock market and issue suggestions on which companies are rising — and which may be due for a correction in value. Others will track industry trends in order to give executives the data they need to make decisions.
Think of it as teaching, but for a potential audience of hundreds or even thousands instead of a single classroom. The best business analysts can command the attention of their sector and sometimes, even move markets.
Based on our survey data, you can expect to see a starting salary of roughly $70,000 (albeit with a wide range, as graduate analyst salaries we’ve seen go from $50,000 to over $100,000). Because successful analysts can deliver a great deal of value, you’ll also be well-positioned to earn more moving forward should your role prove a good fit.
These highly-ranked employers all typically hire analysts.
If you’re looking for additional inspiration, here are a few more potential roles to consider.
If you have a secondary education major, that does not mean that you will be restricted to teaching roles only.
You can also opt for educational administration-related roles. This way you would not be working directly in the classroom but would have a supervisory role.
Some of the more common job titles include school principal and vice-principal or even superintendent. Superintendents and principals usually oversee not just a single school but often multiple schools located within a district.
These people are in charge of all the day-to-day operations. Moreover, they are required to work with all of the staff members at these schools in order to provide a highly safe and equally productive learning environment for every student enrolled in the school.
Another side of counselling is working directly for a college or career centre. It is the responsibility of counsellors to provide feedback to students and prospective employees with regard to choosing the right university or college, or for that matter, a career based on their own innate strengths as well as weaknesses.
By the same token, admissions recruiters also have a similar job description and background as the typical admissions counsellor. These people are directly responsible for promoting the educational institution they work for and recruiting prospective students.
Both admissions counsellors and recruiters can also work to provide important information about various schools and give campus tours to help the prospect in making an informed decision. Admissions counsellors and recruiters work for private schools, career centres, public schools, colleges, and private businesses.
Nursing is also a great job for anyone who has a secondary education major. A nurse takes care of his or her patients and makes sure they are safe, comfortable, and getting their nourishment and medicines, as and when required.
An education qualification can give you a head start to achieving nursing professionalism. In fact, professionalism in nursing is one of the most basic requirements for a good nurse.
There are many jobs in the adult education sector that offer great benefits to anyone who holds an education major. As a matter of fact, teaching adults can be an extremely rewarding profession because adult education does not involve as many challenges as elementary or even secondary-level education.
Unlike children, adults voluntarily enrol in the many night schools that dot the adult education landscape. They have a genuine desire to learn. Many adult educators are also hired by corporations and in one-on-one instructional settings.
Many adult education jobs come with a whole lot of benefits such as highly flexible hours and high average annual salaries too.
Camp director jobs can be a great opportunity if you are in the process of looking for a second job, or for that matter, even a brand new career. Most camp directors usually tend to work seasonally, while maintaining full-time employment during the rest of the school year.
Your education background does not mean you’ve got to become a teacher in the traditional sense.
But every organisation on Earth — from companies to governments to NGOs and more — needs help learning, growing, and opening up to new ways of working. And you’d be well-positioned to support that effort.
If that sounds appealing, take a look at some of the roles and employers we’ve mentioned. Or just jump right in and browse open positions on GradAustralia that are hiring students with education degrees.
See what’s out there. We think you’ll find something compelling!
Find out by searching GradAustralia for open roles specifically asking for grads with teaching degrees! You’ll enjoy:
See what jobs are open right now!