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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Does she just cold apply or does she do some networking first then does an apply w/referral?

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.

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.

Another option, assuming she wants to leave education behind completely, might be some sort of HR generalist role. Might have to start at the bottom, which could sting a bit at first.

Long-term, she could aim for something like an HR Business Partner (HRBP) - they are often equivalent to senior manager/director/AVP. They seem to do a bit of everything, frequently with senior leaders in the business unit they support and/or senior external consultants.

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