Kathleen Kruiniger spent six years teaching Geography, six years as a teacher training adviser, and now works as a faculty employability adviser at the University of Bristol. Here she shares how the skills and knowledge she gained as a teacher have proved useful throughout her career.
Communication
Good teaching hinges on good communication — but success in so many other roles is also dependent on this.
In teaching you are always working to understand what makes your students tick, and what they will respond well to. This transfers well to other environments where getting the most out of those you work with is beneficial too.
I’ve applied the communication skills learnt in teaching to how I work with colleagues, coaching and mentoring others, and situations where I need to be persuasive or motivational.
Leadership
In teaching, you are making decisions for your students and for your classes on very short timescales every day, as well as undertaking longer term planning for them.
I’ve been able to draw on this to demonstrate leadership qualities in terms of my ability to use initiative, to take on responsibilities, to manage a project and to make balanced decisions, which has been really useful when applying for further roles.
I’ve also found that some teaching skills have transferred well into coaching and mentoring aspects of my further roles, whereby I’ve been able to apply knowledge on how to set achievable goals, build confidence and trust, and encourage others to take ownership of their learning.
Presenting
I’ve utilised the principles and frameworks of lesson planning in my other roles, as many of the same things apply whether you’re teaching children or delivering a presentation to adults — you need to get them interested, build rapport, set out what you want to achieve and keep it interesting.
My knowledge and experience from teaching has made this much more successful. I’m currently planning and delivering my sessions online, which is a very different setting to the secondary classroom I taught in, but I’m still applying the same principles and finding ways to tweak these for online delivery.
Time management
As a teacher I learnt how to plan and how important planning was in managing a busy workload. This skill is also critical in any other professional role, and so I’ve found myself going back to strategies I used in teaching in order to achieve a longer to-do list during busy spells.
Setting a defined amount of time to achieve a task that I need to get done is a key learning from this — I learnt that from the early days of teaching, spending far longer than I needed to on a lesson plan! In my training and first months of teaching, other teachers were really helpful in advising me how to refine my time management skills.
Knowledge of the education sector
Education is broader than teaching in schools, and since moving into work in higher education I’ve found that much of my knowledge from teaching still applies.
It’s useful to have had that basis in secondary education, to really understand where the students are coming from, and what their needs might be. It also means that I can demonstrate my level of knowledge of the sector and my commitment to positive outcomes for others.
To find out more about a career in teaching, visit the Get into Teaching website.
