A Tale of Two Project Managers

Two teachers. No PM qualifications. Both now thriving in project management — because the skills were there all along.

Jen taught secondary science for 23 years. Lauren taught drama for 12. Neither of them set out to work in project management, and neither holds a project management qualification. Now both are now doing exactly that, in roles they find genuinely fulfilling, drawing almost entirely on skills they built inside the classroom.

Their stories are worth telling together. Not because they're the same, but because the differences between them say something useful about how transferable skills actually work, and why the subject you taught turns out to be largely beside the point.

Two different problems, the same root cause

Jen left teaching knowing that organisation, problem solving, and supporting others were her strengths but her path to project management wasn't a straight line. She spent time in the Academy, built a VA business with real clients, and was genuinely enjoying it when a civil service reserve position she'd applied for earlier came through. It was a decision that took some thought. She'd been working for herself and liked it, but returning to her own priorities and what she knew about herself helped her recognise that being part of a team mattered to her - and that the permanent role, with its structure and room for progression, was the right move.

Lauren left with a direction already in mind but couldn't get through the door. She was freelancing, getting to final interview stages and not landing anything. She knew where she wanted to go - she just couldn't present her experience in terms that landed with employers outside education.

Different paths, different sticking points, but with the same root. In both cases, years of genuinely relevant professional experience wasn't being communicated in a way that made sense beyond a school context, and once they found the language to reframe and translate that experience, things started to shift.

The skills themselves

What's striking about Jen and Lauren is how different their classroom experience looks at first glance, and how similar it turns out to be when you look more carefully.

Jen's career was built around precision, scientific data, structure, and measurable outcomes. Lauren's was built around performance, coordination, and live delivery under pressure and she also had examining experience. Different disciplines, different daily realities, and yet both had spent years managing complex, multi-stage processes with hard deadlines and finite resources. Coordinating people across competing priorities, developing the ability to read a room quickly, adapt their approach, and move a group towards an outcome.

Lauren puts it plainly: "When you're organising a school production, that's project management." She's right. You're working with different teams, delivering to a budget, delivering to quality, delivering on time. Jen arrived at the same realisation from a different angle, recognising that each class was essentially its own project and that she had been responsible for every outcome within it.

Neither of them had framed it that way while they were teaching. Both found, once they did, that it changed what felt possible.

Stakeholder management is the other skill both of them highlight, and it's worth dwelling on. Teachers spend years managing relationships across a wide range of personalities, adapting how they communicate constantly, and navigating difficult dynamics without escalating them. Jen describes it as guiding people "in a kind of tiptoe way" - and in the organisations they both moved into, that capacity turned out to be rarer and more valued than either of them had expected.

Where they are now

Their current roles reflect how broad project management actually is, rather than mapping onto a single defined job title.

Jen works as a Project Support Officer in a civil service Project Management Office, supporting a range of projects across board papers, risk management, benefits tracking, and team communications. Having completed our Project Management Fundamentals accreditation, Jen also recently completed her APM Project Fundamentals qualification and is beginning to work out which areas she'd like to specialise in.

Lauren works as a Project Manager at an education research charity, coordinating complex assessment projects across multiple internal teams. Eighteen months in, she describes the role as varied, challenging, and logically demanding.

Both roles are predominantly remote or hybrid. Both describe an adjustment period in which a different pace (slower!) and culture took some getting used to. Worth acknowledging, but not something either of them frames as a negative.

The skills they use every day

What their day-to-day actually requires is coordinating across multiple teams with competing demands, communicating clearly with stakeholders at different levels, managing risk, spotting problems before they escalate, and keeping complex processes on track towards a deadline. None of that came from a qualification. All of it came from teaching.

Jen's risk assessment instincts, now flagged by colleagues as a particular strength, were developed in a classroom where she was constantly anticipating what could go wrong and adjusting course before it did. Lauren's ability to hold lots of moving parts together without losing sight of the end goal was built across twelve years of productions, performances, and departmental coordination.

These aren't loose analogies. They are the same skills, applied in a different context. The planning behind a project timeline is the same planning behind a scheme of work. The communication that keeps a project board informed is the same communication that keeps parents, leadership, and students aligned. The resource management that delivers a project to budget is the same resource management that kept a department running on whatever was left after everything else had been cut.

What teaching rarely gives you is the language to describe any of this in a way that employers outside education recognise.

That's the gap - and it's a much smaller gap than most teachers assume. Jen describes the moment it closed: "I kept thinking, oh, I have actually done that." Lauren's framing points to the same shift - her skills needed to be "said in a way that someone interviewing me for a project management role could understand."

Once they could say it clearly, the rest followed. Not because they'd become different professionals, but because they'd finally made visible what teaching had been building in them for years.

If you're a teacher considering project management as a next step, our next Project Management Fundamentals CPD accredited course starts on Wednesday 6th May. Limited places available HERE.

Categories: : Career Change Ideas, Ex-Teacher Tales