4 Ways You Can Support Your Teacher Transition This Winter Break - Prep Now!

While I want you all to be resting this winter break - I also need to be real. You need to kickstart your teacher transition now so you’re ready to leave teaching by summer. And there are four things you can do over winter break to support your transition.

Don’t push yourself too hard, don’t set unattainable expectations, and don’t miss out on being present with loved ones. You do need and deserve this break period so you’re refreshed for your students and your transition.

But if you find yourself with down time in the mornings or during the week, this is the perfect time to start building habits and setting a strong foundation for yourself.

Let’s look at four realistic things you can do over this winter break to kickstart your teacher transition - start prepping now!

1. Collect All Student Progress, Fundraising, and Other Stats

You’ll likely want to do this just before break begins in case you need to log in to anything you can’t from home. At school, gather all of the info on how greatly you’ve improved student performance, how much money you raised in fundraising events, and any other data to show your impact.

Once you have this data collected, you can spend time over winter break analyzing it and how you can use it to market yourself to potential employers. Decide how you can best use this data in your resume, on LinkedIn, and as talking points in interviews.

2. Do a skills assessment

As a teacher, you have so many valuable, transferable skills for EdTech companies. You just need to discover them.

Look at your ideal role, whether that’s in sales, marketing, learning design, etc. What skills do they require? What tools do they need to know? Try scanning a job description for a company you would like to work for - what skills are they asking for? What duties would you be in charge of?

Now what skills do you have, and where do you need to upskill?

3. Complete a course or certification

After doing your skills assessment and seeing where you need to upskill, find a course or certification that can help you learn more about your role. You might start by watching videos online about different skills involved your ideal role - if something seems a bit more complex or very new to you, that’s where you should take a course.

You might even take some time before break to find courses and certifications that would help you upskill and become a more attractive candidate. Then, during break, complete a course!

4. Start a blog or portfolio

The best thing to do here would be to purchase the site now so when break comes around, you can dive in with designs and posts.

Blogs and portfolios can take a lot of time to make just how you want them, so don’t set a deadline to have it all sorted out before the end of break. Just use this time to get started. You can spend more time throughout the semester working on it now that you have the foundations built.

You don’t need to do a lot - you just need to start.

Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t forget to enjoy this season. Just take baby steps now and build habits so that, by the time summer comes around, you are such a strong candidate who knows their skills, abilities, and - most importantly - their worth.