Edtech companies and education non-profits hire Project or Program Management roles frequently – it is one of the top five job categories on Skip’s job board. It’s a role that edjacent organizations hire for consistently every month. 

It’s also a field that often hires career pivoters. The number of jobs looking for career pivoters (i.e. those who have current or significant experience in education) actually exceeds the number of jobs looking for 2-5 years of experience (which is the most common experience requirement overall). What’s even better is that companies pay roughly the same salary range for career pivoters as they do for candidates with 5-8 years of experience. That means your classroom and school-based project management experience translates into similar experience outside of education.

As you can see in the chart, career pivoters are in demand. When companies are hiring career pivoters, they explicitly ask for “education experience” and “higher ed” experience in about two thirds of these roles. The other third is evenly divided between current teachers and k12 administrators. Companies look at your knowledge and skills and say very clearly that it makes you well-qualified to run their educational programming and projects.  

Does that surprise you? Many career pivoters see companies ask for 2-3 years of project management experience and say, “well I’m not qualified.” I talked about how to more accurately assess your skills in my last newsletter (“When to Apply to Stretch Roles,”). Today I wanted to talk more about how project management skills are a gateway to many distinct edtech or edjacent careers and how they are skills that (former) teachers have in spades. 

For those of you who have already transitioned into an edtech or edjacent career, focusing on your project management skills positions you for roles you might have thought out of your reach. For example, identifying your existing project management experience can help you apply confidently to roles like a Senior Curriculum Developer role I posted that asked for 4+ years of experience in project management and instructional/curriculum design. This is the type of role that wasn’t looking for someone who has had a Project Management job title – they were looking for a candidate who has the relevant experience managing projects (something that is actually hard to avoid doing as curriculum developer!). 

Which brings up a really interesting fact about project management: it’s a job title and it’s a key functional skill commonly found in many different roles. When I analyzed jobs that were not categorized as Project/Program Management roles, I found a significant number of them still asked for project management experience. For those roles where I have full-time job descriptions, about 20% of them explicitly talked about project management responsibilities or skills. Sometimes it was a substitute for saying someone needed to be “organized” or that they had “time management skills” but it also highlights how integral this skills is for a wide range of jobs. A handful of those roles even required PMP certification, even though they were curriculum development jobs!

Whether you’re transitioning from education or advancing within edtech, highlighting your project management skills helps you target a key skill that recruiters are looking for. For remote edtech roles especially, the ability to manage collaborations and work independently are key skills but they also position you for career advancement. When you can demonstrate that you have strong systematic approaches to managing projects — whether formally or as an extension of your core duties — you signal to employers that you can handle increased responsibilities in the future. 

Table of Contents:

• Understand What Edtech Companies Mean When They Ask for “Project Management” Experience
• Project Management Experience is Needed Outside of Project Management Jobs
• Writing Strong Project Management Bullet Points at Every Stage of Your Career
• PMP Certification: Do Edtech Employers Actually Require It?

What is Project Management Exactly? 

I’ve written about two of the three types of P-Management already: Product Management and Program Management. Project management is so integral to many roles, including product and program management.

It’s a skill that many of you excel at but don’t quite know how to effectively include in the resume. I see many resumes that list “time management” or “organizational” soft skills in a skills block but then don’t include any clear project management-related bullet point later in the resume. Adding this type of bullet point is a fantastic way to communicate many soft skills that employers look for and can also position you for those roles that explicitly call it out. 

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