This week I’m talking about School Success roles, a fairly unique role to the edtech industry but one which I post on the job board, especially in the Spring. In today’s post, I’ll focus on what makes the role different from similar roles in a larger Customer Success department.

What does a School Success Associate* do?

School Success Associates support and train educators to use a particular edtech product, program, or system. Typically the job responsibilities fall into two large buckets: client support and professional learning.

Client support includes being responsive over multiple channels (email, phone, Zoom) to questions teachers have as they integrate the product into their classroom. It also means creating knowledge databases, educator-facing guides, and other resources that streamline the support process and help the company manage a larger user base. One frequent soft skill this job requires is to be a “problem solver” — being able to figure out how to help someone do what she needs and wants to do and also seeing how that relates to other people.

School Success Associates provide support to teacher but the role is not a Customer Support department. Success and Support are different departments. Customer Support departments provide more technical support (i.e. answering questions about passwords) that reacts to a client’s needs while Customer Success roles anticipate needs and focus on implementing the product into the classroom (e.g. offering a walkthrough of the product’s capabilities or helping a teacher adapt it to their classroom).

School Success Associates frequently facilitate professional development workshops and webinars, for example. Post-pandemic these can occur in person but many have remained virtual. Workshops typically focus on helping educators and administrators set-up the product, use new features, or adapt the product to their classroom/school. Most School Success Associates will also work 1:1 with educators or small groups as needed — for example to create relevant instructional content.

And, of course, both client support and training require ancillary tasks like tracking processes and data, evaluating results, and other project management responsibilities.

*As you probably know from your job search, job titles are often unique to a particular company. The School Success roles I’ve shared in the job board the past year have gone by the following names: School Success — Adoption Manager, Teacher Success Associate, School Success Associate, School Partnerships Success Manager, and Curricular Solution Architect.

What is the role of School Success in a Customer Success department?

Some of the work a School Success Manager does may sound a lot like implementation work that Customer Success Managers do. So why is it a different role?

School Success is the most immediate bridge job to the Customer Success department because it doesn’t require the contract-related tasks that CSMs regularly do (like contract renewals or upselling products). It’s a role where your SME expertise as an educator stands out because School Success Associates work directly with educators to help them use a company’s edtech product more effectively.

While, you will find variations in the real world* as specific companies tweak job roles to fit their business needs, most School Success Associates work directly with teachers (not administrators) for the majority of their time.

(*Company size and stage (i.e. start-up, growth, mature, etc) have the largest impact on job roles. For example, a start-up might be all-hands-on-deck while a mature company can hire candidates to do very specific, tightly corralled roles. We’re, of course, familiar with this same business model in our schools – some larger districts have attendance deans whereas a smaller school district may ask an AP to do some tasks from that role while other parts of the role may just not be done by anyone or are divided up amongst additional employees.)

As you apply for jobs, understanding the key distinctions between different roles in a Customer Success department lets you recognize when a company has combined aspects of these different roles into a single position. That can help you tailor your application and include the right information (rather than too many irrelevant details or too few relevant ones) and can help you ask more relevant questions at an interview.

This is how the two roles are different

Just because School Success is a bridge job from education doesn’t mean it’s an entry-level Customer Success role. What this means is you’ll often see an educator move into CSM after a stint as a School Success Associate but you’ll also see CSMs move into School Success. (Newsela is a good example of this pattern — when they first started hiring School Success Managers, their first hires were internal CSMs. Then they added the educators to the mix.)

What makes it a good bridge role from education is that School Success Associates work directly with educators and schools to use the product in their classroom. Most of their time is spent communicating with educators. They need to be very competent project managers and have a deep understanding of their product, including its technical features. So your SME expertise as an educator is very valuable in this role.

Customer Success Managers have additional tasks that School Success Associates don’t typically perform. Because one of their focuses is on upselling clients, they’ll often work with districts to find new ways to use the edtech product or platform — even working directly with product and engineering teams to custom design features. So while both work on helping districts implement and use the product, Customer Success Managers operate at a different scale than the School Success Associate.

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