How to Climb the Teaching Career Ladder

We usually reserve the term climbing the ladder for corporate settings. Boardrooms, power suits, promotions. We don’t often associate the term with those in the education sector. We think teachers, principals, and the list end there.

But teaching, like any career, has room for diverse growth. You can climb in almost any direction if you know what to do. If career progression is on your agenda, read on. This guide will get your mental cogs turning.

Manifest your destiny

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If the career ladder is an epiphany you had last night, now is the time to act. Make a plan. Climbing aimlessly won’t take you to a genuinely fulfilling place in your career. You don’t need your career path mapped in forensic detail, just a rough and reliable roadmap.

Visualising your career path gives you clarity. How? By giving you an idea of what the sequence needs to be. Exercise as much critical self-reflection as possible. Why? Not every promotion is a step in the right direction. Rather than climbing the ladder at your current school, you might be better off finding a similar role in a different school, one whose goals align better with yours.

If all this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. It all starts with a plan.

Building a professional network

Every vocation is a business of relationships. Even a truck driver, who spends hours upon hours on the road, is part of a fleet. Working within a single school, you’ll have your own community of colleagues. Those that teach subjects you couldn’t know less about, those that help you design better classroom science experiments.

It mightn’t be at the top of your priority list, but building your professional network expands the world around you. Not every step you take in your career will be brightly lit before you; sometimes, it takes a random connection with a teacher from another faculty or school to light it for you.

Be agile, be active, and be affable; be all three, and your network will blossom.

Keeping abreast of industry changes

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Education is often a paradox. At a policy level, changes can be cripplingly slow; in the schoolyard, the only constant is change. As a teacher, you fall right in the middle. Juggling both sides will be your biggest challenge as long as you remain a practising teacher.

In the schoolyard, it’s a matter of osmosis; just being around the students will help you understand how younger generations speak (in other words, understand the litany of new TikTok phrases that appear daily). Policy and other industry changes will demand a more active approach. Regardless of how long it takes for these changes to trickle down to your classroom, it’s worth being aware.

Climbing the ladder successfully relies on a healthy dose of initiative; by seeking to understand any possible industry changes, you allow yourself to respond and adapt. You’re also raising your hand for career progression by showing future employers you care by answering interview questions perfectly.

Pursuing further education

You can’t avoid this one. Not that you’d want to. Education begets education; the more you learn, the better educator you become. A counterargument to challenge that fact doesn’t exist.

You can take a conquer-all approach, or you can be strategic. The answer will lie in where you want to end up. Becoming the principal of your local high school mightn’t require you to understand Shakespeare; it might, however, require a doctorate that qualifies you as a Doctor in Educational Leadership.

Even if the role you’re working toward doesn’t call you back to studying, it will no doubt demand you upskill in some way, so do your research.

Continuous self-improvement

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Pursuing further education is formal self-formation. Now it’s time to consider less formal self-improvement. In the case of this guide, we’re talking about soft skills. If you’ve been a teacher for some time, your soft skills—communication, empathy, compassion—will be more refined than most. But you can always refine them more.

Enhancing your soft skills is a pursuit everyone should take, career or not. They enable you to better navigate your life and build better connections. They enable you to climb the ladder.

Each step matters on the career ladder

All career ladders are climbed the same way: with persistence, resilience, and adaptability. Approach the task in this manner, and you’re bound to gain ascendancy, regardless of whether you’re a physician or a physical education teacher.

Have a plan, too. Don’t climb for the sake of climbing. If you hope to one day reshape numeracy policy for primary school kids, note the steps you think you’ll need to take. Revisit these steps each time you take one. Though a career ladder is linear in metaphor, it’s anything but in life. Consider the stops you’ll make on the way to your desired destination, and your journey will be all the more enjoyable.

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Manuela WillboldChief of Marketing: As the Chief of Marketing at the digital marketing agency ClickDo Ltd I blog regularly about technology, education, lifestyle, business and many more topics.