Before Covid, teachers transitioned into EdTech or L&D much less frequently than they started to do after 2020. In these early days, teachers were often offered more junior roles (i.e. Customer Success Associate rather than Manager) and lower salaries than in our current environment. Many of these former teachers worked their way up the internal promotion ladder, and then they started hiring (or influencing hiring).

When Covid hit, two things started to happen: teachers suddenly started applying to remote EdTech jobs regularly, and EdTech companies were closing more contracts and had to rapidly hire to fulfill demand. What is interesting about this time is that teachers weren’t just being hired for the entry-level roles as in the past; instead, their experience was taken seriously, and they were increasingly making lateral moves – because of the standards set by the teachers who joined companies before the Covid boom. Even so, there was a divide between companies that were eager to move teachers into more senior roles, and some companies that only hired teachers for entry-level roles.

As the Covid funding boom eased, companies began to close less new business and had tighter upsell opportunities due to school funding cuts. Most companies knew this was coming and adjusted hiring levels accordingly. For example, they hired more contract staff or reduced hours for existing contract staff or they reduced their hiring across the board or shifted it to revenue-generating departments like sales. In addition, many of the teachers who transitioned early in the Covid cycle now had 2+ years of experience and were looking for new roles. This meant that companies could easily find candidates who had recent teaching experience and had worked in an EdTech firm. So the teacher transition enviornment rapidly evolved in the last few years.

So what does that mean for today’s Teacher Transition? What kinds of roles are teachers moving into, what roles are being advertised for teachers, and how should teachers navigate a job search in 2026? That’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s newsletter. A future newsletter will cover the EdTech job market more generally; we’ll dive into the “Relevant Skills” category of jobs in both.

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