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Ask HN: How can I best assist my wife with a career transition?

• dcdc123 4y ago
  A lot of non-developers at Ed tech companies are/were teachers. Not sure if that is helpful.
• pythonic_hell 4y ago
  Have you considered moving to a country that values education? You wife will probably see a pay raise, strong union rights and better work life balance. Some countries that come to mind would be the Netherlands, Germany, the nordics. An added bonus to this is that your family will be able to benefit from the strong family support programs that these countries offer - tax breaks, grants, friendly city planning which gives children more independence.
• mlac 4y ago
  If I was in your shoes, here’s what I’d do: 1) Set a timeline for her to take time off with the kids. Summer would be perfect, and she can start applying in the fall. She’s probably burnt out and needs the time off more than either of you know. 2) If you’re not already, develop a written plan to get completely out of debt except for your mortgage. This will lower your monthly fixed costs as much as possible and allow for flexibility. 3) She should be lightly looking and networking (but not stressing) for opportunities over the summer. Bump that information against the review of finances and you can determine whether or not she needs to (or wants to) go back to work or stay home with the kids. Recognize that only 1 income adds stress to your life, because if you lose your job then it gets real, really quickly. 4) Longer term, she can look at online training opportunities or local colleges if she wants to switch careers and feels a degree would help her transition. This may lead to a reduction in lifestyle, but in a lot of cases (not necessarily yours) lifestyle inflation may have eaten up all of her salary anyway. Cut back on eating out, nicer cars, etc, and you will have more time with the family while the kids are young. The reality may be that she can’t take a break right now due to your financial situation. Then I’d spend the next couple of months figuring out what to cut, realizing that time with family is likely more rewarding than a slightly bigger house, BMW over a Subaru, and more toys. TL;DR: Take a break. Get your finances in order. Figure out your next steps without pressure.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    This is great advice! We're pretty on top of our finances so we have a decent (but finite) runway to get everything figured out. My wife is a VERY driven person, which is the main reason for the push to get a job quickly. If anything I'm trying to convince her that she doesn't need to feel the pressure that she does, haha. She has been loving the quality time with our children while job hunting which I think is helping to convince her to slow down and find something that really fits the work/life balance she's aiming for.
• Irongirl1 4y ago
  https://sidehustleschool.com/episode/592/ https://sidehustleschool.com/episode/592/
• pinewurst 4y ago
  May I suggest looking at corporate sales enablement/internal education? Usually super nice people, well paid, not especially stress-y (at least in any healthy organization).
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    She's been focusing on those types of roles, but I worry she's not getting through due to not having experience with specific tools they use (e.g. Adobe Captivate). It feels to me like if she can just get someone on the phone she'd be a very strong candidate, but that first step is hard without knowing people.
    • mxuribe 4y ago
      Small, minor suggestion: maybe there are free, open source tools that are equivalent to what your wife might be expected to know...you being a techi can spin up some of these free tools, and she can gain some - though minimal - experience...and in her resume, or maybe cover letter tie her experience to these free tools as "similar to the industry standard set of tools...", etc. This helps because it inserts the keywords of industry standard tools, enabling the automated scripts to help get her on HR-system search results...but its not lying since the resume/CV states her experience is adjacent or something...and by then maybe a sympathetic hiring person might give her a shot? Obviously, this is a tiny tactic part of a greater set of strategies that she couild employ. ;-)
      • bluesroo 4y ago
        That's a good idea, thanks. We'll poke around and see what we can find.
      • tomas_nort 4y ago
    • pinewurst 4y ago
      I was actually thinking more about designing/teaching enablement classes - often live in many places - rather than using various goofy design apps for canned lessons. :)
• tptacek 4y ago
  Serious question: what's your goal with this post? Are you hoping to get ideas and then references for places where someone with an academic background and a career in teaching might move to next, especially in the tech industry? Or are you more interested in the dynamics of spouses helping each other with their careers? I ask because you might get more useful answers if you clarify a bit; the post is fine!
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    I've edited the end of the post, thanks for the feedback. You're right that I can kinda mushing things together.
• jaylaal 4y ago
  Beyond her own professional search, I'd suggest you making more time to be with the kids and handle household crap that she might be dealing with. Take things off her plate so she can recover from her previous situation and reflect and act on her future path. In my experience, this will be hard for you because you'll necessarily do less at work and have less time to improve yourself professionally and personally outside of work, but the payoff in stress reduction for your wife should be worth it in short- and medium-terms until she gets re-settled. Background: Software engineer for over 15 years; twin 3 year-olds at home; wife is a teacher.
  • pavel_lishin 4y ago
    It will be hard, but there's ways to balance this at work - when my wife was attending a bootcamp, my work was flexible enough to let me change my hours to work early mornings and evenings on more asynchronous tasks, while I took the main 9-5 hours to handle childcare. Everything else suffered, of course - forget improving myself, I had little time for basic maintenance! - but she graduated from bootcamp, got a job, and now has a much better career trajectory than at her previous career.
    • steve_adams_86 4y ago
      This resonates with me too. When my wife had a great career opportunity some years ago, this is roughly where it went. Unless you have deep pockets, working odd hours and managing the home ~9-5 is probably in the cards. I found it incredibly exhausting at the time (definitely didn’t take care of myself either) but it was fortunately worth it. My wife went from soul crushing, dimly lit, repetitive, poorly paid hydrographical work for the navy to real ocean sciences. She gets to survey the coastal waters of BC, Canada, participate in technical dives, install cool tide sensing units, check out places we’d otherwise never see, and is something like 9000% happier. I probably set my career back less than hers went forward, and ultimately, I think we’re both happier for it regardless of our earning potentials. But yeah, what a slog. I get tired just thinking about it. To be honest, there were times where it was hard on both of us and I wasn’t sure we’d pull through! That’s why I wanted to add this note and say yes, it takes sacrifice, it’s hard, etc. Go in more prepared than I did. Above all, support the people you love. You’ll be glad you did.
• tptacek 4y ago
  Is she talking to people in the tech industry about roles, or in a bunch of different industries? People here probably have sharp feedback about how to cut through resume screens in tech, but less confidence about other fields. In recruiting processes where the listed contact is an HR or recruiting person, cold resume/cover-letter pitches are tough, because the person you're talking to actually doesn't know enough to promote someone who doesn't fit the profile they've been told to look for. If that's what's happening, the common advice is to hunt down other people in the company and talk to them directly.
• conductr 4y ago
  Independent/private schools could be an option for her. The teachers at my son’s school seem to get the best of all things; work life balance, compensation, resources, etc. I feel they navigated Covid more thoughtfully than my local public schools as well and were very proactive towards planning for different scenarios that could play out. By most accounts I’ve heard the public schools displayed a low level of leadership and strategic planning to get ahead of even the most likely scenarios which caused nearly ever stakeholder a degree of stress. Probably teachers above all.
  • dwater 4y ago
    Most private schools pay teachers less than public schools in the same locale and have overall worse benefits as well.
    • fhood 4y ago
      Seconded, the main draw is a better work environment and free tuition.
      • brimble 4y ago
        Assuming the school's good (the majority of private schools aren't, really) that is absolutely one of the main perks. Free or reduced tuition can end up, effectively, being most of your compensation, especially if you have more than one kid going.
    • conductr 4y ago
      Interesting. A case were my observation doesn't match reality at large. Where I live the private school teachers seem relatively well compensated. But I live in a mecca of sorts for private schools (Dallas's "private school corridor")
  • kangman 4y ago
    my wife is a private highschool teacher and is going through a similar situation with the OP's wife.
• jonbrennecke 4y ago
  My wife is in a similar situation. She's a middle-school teacher at a public school in a state that doesn't value public education. While she still loves teaching, her experience mirrors your's in regards to overwork, attrition, etc. For a job that should get off at 3pm, she routinely works all evening on grading, lesson planning and other admin tasks. We also live in an area where teachers are poorly compensated relative to the cost of living. I'm well paid as a software engineer, which just makes her feel worse about the value of her career in teaching when she works longer hours than I do. We've talked about her leaving teaching at the end of the school year with the plan to get her PhD so she can teach at a college level.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    It's pretty crazy. My wife went the grad school route on the way here, not sure there's any willpower left for more of it haha. Good luck to you guys
    • jonbrennecke 4y ago
      Yeah my wife is a math teacher, and getting a PhD in Math is no joke. I honestly have no idea what this process will look like. But we don't have kids yet so it's now or never to make big life changes haha
      • wbsss4412 4y ago
        Yeah that would be quite the achievement. The distance between math teacher and math professor is vast.
      • BadCookie 4y ago
        A more likely path would be getting a doctorate in education or math education, but I’m not sure whether either of those would be helpful to her.
  • brimble 4y ago
    Damn, how many of us are there? I'm trying to get mine to switch to project or product management because she'd be awesome at it and has, for years, kept taking on big projects at schools she's worked at (think: leading teams to create and implement new educational systems from scratch, running various extracurriculars, et c) and basically doing one or both of those roles, with great success, while enjoying it. I'm like "you could have half the stress and double or more the pay". She's semi-open to it and I'm continuing to wear her down, but she's likely not going back to teaching next year regardless (may just take a year off—the last four or five years have been really rough)
• neoeno 4y ago
  Software engineering education is a good job market right now and (I believe) has better pay and working conditions than public sector teaching. If she’s up for that path, she could learn some technical skills and then teach them. I’m probably the wrong country (UK) to help directly but I lead a team of technical educators and happy to have a chat about the path of useful. Email in bio.
  • mettamage 4y ago
    When I just graduated CS I started teaching a bootcamp. I was one of the best teachers and some of my students are having better careers than I do as a software engineer. If I've learned anything: technical skills need to be medium, teaching skills need to be high. I also observed about 5 teachers (sitting in on their classes with their permission) and have seen teachers that have: - high programming, high teaching skils (e.g. compiler construction, web-design, SIMD stuff, reverse engineering with x64, PHP, C++, trees with cycles, it didn't matter, he could do it) - high web dev, low teaching skills (he got fired) - high web dev, medium teaching skills, from a macho culture (he got fired, as I come from a more egalitarian/feminine culture) - medium web dev, high teaching skills (he aced it) - Myself
• alistairSH 4y ago
  What area are you in? Local to me (DC metro), I know about a half-dozen former teachers who transitioned into corporate L&D/instruction/etc (all prior to COVID, so maybe the market has changed). Most of them had Masters degrees in education. Can't tell you what they did to get interviews, but it was definitely a viable career path in the 2010s. Edit - my wife made a massive career change about a decade ago. But, different industry and background. No college, but worked to director-level at her then-employer. She knew she wanted to change, so got them to pay for her MS degree, worked the required time after, and found another job. My part was just being extra helpful with our son - more of the driving to sports and things like that. Helping more around the kitchen. And also serving as editor while she working on the MS - it was an adjustment doing academic writing after many years of corporate jargon.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    It's helpful to know that the stuff she's applying for has worked for others you knew! She's also looking for instructor-adjacet corporate stuff. Getting the interviews is definitely the hard part right now. We're pretty evenly split on most housework, but I agree that picking up some extra to help out would be good.
    • bigthymer 4y ago
      Does she just cold apply or does she do some networking first then does an apply w/referral?
      • bluesroo 4y ago
        Most applications are cold applied right now just because we don’t have too many connections here. We’re trying to crawl our networks and see if we can find some intros.
        • bigthymer 4y ago
          I don't recommend limiting yourself to networking with only people you know, especially when the company you are interested in applying to is large (in terms of head count). Once you find a company of interest, reach out to people at the company via LinkedIn. Just ask questions about initiatives that they are doing. Ask intelligent questions, ones that show you've done some preliminary research on your own. After a little back and forth, mention that you are interested in applying. Ask what the best way to apply would be. At this point, ideally, they respond with a "let me forward your resume to our in-house people." If they say you can apply online, you can slightly nudge by asking if they think a referral would help the process. Hopefully they bite and offer to refer you. If not, you can try reaching out to someone else. At big companies, people freely hand out referrals since they get money if you get hired but suffer no penalties if you don't. When I tried this method on LinkedIn for my own entry-level job search, I would probably get responses 10-20% of the time. Just giving you that number so you get a better idea of what success looks like in this situation.
• twunde 4y ago
  Many colleges/universities have career offices that offer services for alumni switching careers. It's at least worth reaching out and seeing if they can help set up informational interviews if nothing else. If your wife went to grad school for her educational license, it's also worth reaching out to them as well. Other avenues to explore are to talk to members of your church/synagogue/whatever if you belong to one, and/or talk to parents of former students. Other ideas: - Potentially sell curriculums, etc on teacherspayteachers or alternatives - Apply for jobs with education-industry companies like Scholastic, ed-tech companies Best of luck!
• jeffwask 4y ago
  I have a friend who bootcamped her way from teacher to software engineer.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    Haha we've talked about this, but her interest couldn't be farther away from software. I have another family member doing something similar right now.
    • Xeronate 4y ago
      I just want to say I think it's good you're supportive of that. As I'm sure you know, getting into software for the wrong reasons ends very poorly.
    • jeffwask 4y ago
      I just though about this but I used to work for an EdTech and they were often opportunities for teachers in content creation, product management, etc. Their experience was highly sought after.
• rahimnathwani 4y ago
  Does she want to continue with education/learning, or do something else entirely? If she wants to continue in education, a good next step might be a Customer Success role for a company whose customers are schools/districts, e.g. edtech and curriculum companies.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    Education would be her preferred landing spot, it just doesn't seem viable for the work/life balance she's aiming for. Customer success roles are definitely on the radar, just getting through the resume filter has been tough.
• tehalex 4y ago
  I work at an ed-tech and most of our non-technical (sales, curriculum, customer success, etc) have a background in education. It's valuable for those roles to have education experience and it's a natural fit/transition for people looking to get out of education itself. However, *many* teachers want to get out of education for the reasons you have described, so unfortunately here it's quite competitive even for relatively entry level positions on that side of the house. It might be worth considering applying to education companies specifically, which would give some corporate/business experience that might enable a future pivot elsewhere for her. My brother and sister-in law (not married to each other but just by coincidence) also both work for tutoring/supplemental private education companies, but more on the business/leadership/curriculum side of things. Because of the nature of the job, their hours are unusual (late starts, not Monday-Friday), but otherwise seems like a better environment than public education. I know both of their companies hire public school teachers for instructional roles, but I don't know what the advancement paths are like.
• xwdv 4y ago
  Why not just let her be a stay at home mom and put this whole career thing to rest? You can afford it, and having a parent that can be around 24/7 with the kids is immensely valuable. A teaching career isn’t going to contribute much to your family unit.
  • xrikcus 4y ago
    That's an interesting reaction. My read of the post was that he wants to help his wife do what she wants to do. Your read appears to be that he is forcing her to do something when she really wants to stay at home. Do you naturally assume that all mothers want to stay at home with their children full time?
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    Because we both have career ambitions. Also, we have financial goals that we’d like to make regarding our home and future schooling for our children.
    • xwdv 4y ago
      So your ambitious about your careers but not your family?
      • bluesroo 4y ago
        There’s a significant middle ground here that you’re ignoring. This doesn’t feel like a comment in good faith, but I’ll reply one more time: She would like to be able to see our kids off to school and relax with them after school without having to think about work. Weekends without crushing amounts of grading would be nice. That’s the lifestyle my job allows me to have and I’d love for my wife to be able to have the same.
        • xwdv 4y ago
          Those are problems your wife has inflicted on herself. If she wants less grading stop assigning so many complicated assignments. If she doesn’t want to think about work, then she should try to care less. From my experience with friends who are teachers, especially at high school level, there’s no teaching job with built in work-life balance. You must create it through your curriculum and teaching style. Or like I said, she could just quit and be a stay at home mom. There’s other ways to meet your financial goals.
• mmcgaha 4y ago
  Have you considered that she wants to spend most of her time with the children rather than working? Maybe she does not know how to say it to you or herself but she could be looking for an excuse to move into the full time role of a mother. I would find a gentle way to introduce the option to her and even offer encouragement to see if she bites at it.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    We’ve talked pretty directly about what we want from our futures. We haven’t talked about the idea in a while, but she wasn’t interested in being a stay at home mom. Thanks for bringing it up, though. It’s worth talking about again.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sethammons 4y ago
  Former high school teacher turned developer back in 2011. I had a small portfolio of work I had done (some for free and some charged). My resume dropped non-relevant work (so long to the teaching, construction, financial planning, insurance, and graphic design entries). I had some light project work at the end. A recruiter sent me to a few places and I managed to get through the interview at one. Doubled my teaching salary and never looked back. My spouse was supportive of the extra time I had to put in to studying concepts and building toy things.
• pavel_lishin 4y ago
  I'm sorry if I'm just having a hard time understanding - what specifically is your wife looking for? It looks like she's not looking to remain a teacher, but I don't think I understand what types of jobs she's applying for. Regardless, I work for TeachersPayTeachers, and a lot of my colleagues are former teachers themselves; I'd recommend taking a look there if she's not looking to remain a teacher, and you're welcome to contact me with any questions
• jwilber 4y ago
  Education design is a decent area she can potentially pursue from a non-tech skills standpoint (interviews probably contingent on a masters degree). Plenty of tech companies hiring in that area. For a complete career switch, recruiters are also in very high-demand at the moment.
• fhood 4y ago
  If money isn't important, finding a good private school might provide a much more pleasant alternative. It may not be the most morally satisfying thing to transfer a good teacher from public to private education, but I went to public elementary and highschool and a private middle school and the contrast is shocking. Small class sizes, vastly better behaved kids, and a social hierarchy dictated in part by academic success, as well as much nicer school supplies and transportation, largely funded through donations from the wealthier families.
• francisofascii 4y ago
  Kids are 1 and 4. That is tough, but they won't be that young forever. Can she scale back to working as an occasional sub for a few years, and then go back into full time teaching down the road when the kids are much older? Sounds like she loves teaching. Even in a high COL area that should be doable for a few years possibly? Unless you are in the bay area.
• 1auralynn 4y ago
  Go into curriculum development. Work for Wiley or Pearson or someone like that. Edit: As far as how to break into curriculum development, she should highlight any of her work adapting or implementing cutting-edge educational content. Or play up her management skills if she was on any committees or pushed things through at her school. Maybe take up freelance writing or editing? Start a blog and accumulate enough high quality content there to have something to point to
• sbate1987 4y ago
• jvalencia 4y ago
  Look at career opportunities at bloomboard.com
• mrtrombone 4y ago
  I run a software dev/ digital services company and my take on this is for her to consider retraining in a business analyst or change management role. - These require very complementary skills to teaching, - good fundamentals training (iiba, acmp) is usually private, short and no too expensive as opposed to going back to college - the market demand is massive (at least in NZ) These kind of roles fly under the radar in startup world but it's a huge, well paying field in enterprise, local govt etc
• twomoonsbysurf 4y ago
• j7ake 4y ago
  Since your professional experience does not overlap with hers, the good way to help would be to spend more time at home taking care of the kids and doing housework/cooking so she can devote more of her time to job search and build missing skills.
• Thorentis 4y ago
  My wife quit her teaching job once we had kids and hasn't looked back. Looking after children is a full time job in and of itself. Just because you aren't being paid by an employer doesn't mean you aren't doing something valuable. In fact, you could argue that the job of raising children is even more valuable. Sadly this option seems entirely over looked in these types of discussions.
  • bluesroo 4y ago
    Thanks for the reply! We've had long discussions about all the options (one job + one stay at home, moving to a cheaper area, part time, etc.) but both of us at the end of the day are fairly ambitious and want to have careers. Also, in order to be next to our families (not just parents, but siblings and grandparents) the CoL is pretty high and having 2 incomes is required. She's not frustrated with needing to work, it's frustration with the sheer number of hours. A more normal job that would allow us to drop off the kids and pick them up together consistently would be great.
  • fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    This needs to be screamed from the mountain tops
    • mixmastamyk 4y ago
      You don’t buy a home on one income any longer.
      • notsureaboutpg 4y ago
      • jameshush 4y ago
        I mean… you can choose to live in a less expensive area. Especially if one person is a software engineer where remote work is available. Will choosing to live in a different area mean you’ll go from making $500k TC to $150k or $100k? Perhaps . We grew up in a duplex and my brother and I shared a bedroom for years because my parents wanted my mom to focus on taking care of us. I genuinely didn’t realize that our house was technically “worse” than my peers, until I was chatting to my dad about it last year and he mentioned the choice they made. If you don’t want to make that choice, that’s OK too. I choose to listen to death metal music, I don’t expect others to make the sane choices as me. :)