Many people believe that teaching is always a “lifelong” profession, but that’s not always the case. While this is true for many (shoutout to those amazing career veteran teachers out there!), we also know that not everyone who starts as a teacher will continue to work in the classroom for the rest of their lives.

As someone who has had the opportunity to be a PM and hire a lot of product managers, I’ve come to see former teachers as a largely untapped pool of talent. I’ve also seen tech hiring managers blanketly unwilling to hire former teachers into junior PM or similar roles because they don’t have “tech” or “corporate” experience. The narrative is that since teachers teach within large, bureaucratic institutions like local school districts and have only had “one job”, they are bound to be inflexible employees who just need to be told what to do, and are certainly not cut out to be “startup people”. Personally, I think those hiring managers are missing out. PMs and teachers have a lot in common, from a clear vision of a big goal to sharp situational awareness to communication skills and attention to detail. If you are looking for someone who is hungry to start in tech and who can multitask, organize and communicate like a pro, and work on a startup salary, don’t count out hiring a teacher who is changing careers.

Why are former teachers so good at product management? Let’s take a closer look.

Teachers Are Data-Driven

Teachers know that data doesn’t lie. In the classroom, data points are collected by the minute, hourly, weekly, and by curriculum unit and year. And they collect a variety of data, from measurements of individual learning to test scores, student engagement, and overall class performance. These data sets are then used to improve teaching materials or to change the dynamics of a teaching style to better suit the current group of students in a class. Many teachers also have experience putting mandatory data reporting in context and creating their own metrics that matter - they develop additional feedback collection systems that serve their students, no matter what the bureaucratic mandates are. As hiring managers, we know that the ability to use data often and well is essential for strong product managers. Data doesn’t lie in product management any more than it lies in the classroom. When you ask a former teacher to start as a PM, you are bringing on someone with expertly honed data collection skills, because knowing how to collect and interpret data to effect change is one of the key skills of any educator. In other words, they collect and categorize feedback. Every. Single. Day.

Teachers Are Responsive to Feedback

Teachers have one of the most feedback-intensive careers. Not only do they need to collect and respond to feedback from their students, but they also need to be open to feedback from parents, peers, and senior management. Teachers work in a reality that is flooded with feedback daily and which requires them to respond immediately.

In product management, there are just as many cooks in the kitchen and just as much feedback that has to be interacted with. This feedback might change the course of a project, alter the trajectory of marketing plans, or require a response to interpersonal issues that might roadblock long-term landmarks that the product needs to achieve.

Teachers can be counted on to look at the feedback around them and make sense of it, then use it to make wise, objective, and effective decisions.

Teachers Have Excellent Situational Awareness

Whether you are a parent or have simply been around other people’s children and teens, you know that keeping kids safe, on task, and involved can require having eyes in the back of your head. Teachers have to manage as many as thirty or forty humans singlehandedly on a daily basis, keeping them focused on learning, helping them to navigate emotions and external forces around them, and preventing dangerous activities or poor choices. They always need a view of positive activities that are happening to the potential negative forces that might cause mayhem. Teachers are always aware of the environment around them, because they have to be.

Product management requires the same level of situational awareness because there are so many moving parts in play and so many people working hard to make the company’s vision a reality. PMs need a broad perspective that’s constantly being updated. Former teachers can be counted on to notice when there are issues that need to be addressed, because they are constantly looking for them.

Teachers Love to Learn New Things and Grow

The teaching profession as a whole promotes the ethos that learning is a lifelong commitment, and I think that people who become teachers innately value this. After all, it’s hard to commit to teaching others if you don’t fundamentally believe that new skills can be always be learned, or when you don’t enjoy learning yourself. Most teachers are inquisitive and eager to expand their knowledge on nearly any topic, without getting tripped up by ego or embarrassment when they don’t know something. Put another way: teachers are the people who literally teach Growth Mindset to others.

This is key, because PMs - even TPMs - are almost universally not the most technical people on their team. They need to constantly seek out domain knowledge and synthesize context and input from deep subject matter experts, like their engineers or data scientists. The former-teacher PMs I’ve hired in the past were incredibly good at earning the trust of the technical members on their team, because they always asked curious questions instead of pretending they were more technically knowledgeable than their specialized peers.

It’s likely that the former teachers on your team will be inspired to look at what they can do next to improve their own understanding of the market, the product itself, or opportunities for growth and improvement for the company as a whole. As a hiring manager, this kind of proactive thinking is always one of the top qualities I look for.

Teachers Are Adaptable

Every former teacher I’ve hired has been a “startup person”, and I think this is because no professional environment I’ve worked in requires more adaptability than the classroom. Teachers have to deal with a large group of students who are experiencing their own worries, concerns, and traumas, responsible for student learning no matter what happens. This ability to be light on their feet when it comes to information dissemination and changes of plans is essential in the classroom. Not everyone learns the same way, and not every class can be taught the same way. Teachers understand this and can adjust and thrive on the fly.

There is no business niche where this adaptability is not welcome, but product management especially requires changes of direction regularly and an ability to adapt to delays, roadblocks, or challenges that could not have been foreseen. A teacher can effectively tackle all of these potential setbacks and continue to make progress - it’s hard to throw someone off who has dealt with fire drills (literally), changes in curriculum or job rules due to national or state political whims, student fights or appeasing difficult parent stakeholders. Being able to trust that the people you have placed in key positions can think on their feet and make plans on the fly is key for startup growth and success.

Consider Giving that Former-Teacher Applicant an Interview

In our world of applicant tracking system hiring, where job seekers have to use services to embed job-specific keywords into their cover letters just to have a chance of having their job application read by a human, I think it’s likely that career-changers and people with unusual backgrounds ae going to have an even harder time getting that first round interview. While that’s bad for applicants trying to move industries, I think it does mean that employers who are willing to look past keyword matches and seek talent in unexpected places will have an edge - an untrained bot might not know how teaching skills map to PM work, but a thoughtful hiring manager will. For my part, I’ll continue to give former-teacher applicants a serious look. I know how critical former teachers can be for building world-class companies, and I know I’ll want them on my team.