Could Teaching be the Hot Job of the Future?

Each year, I might see one or two high school juniors who desires to become a teacher. Or let me put it another way: Each year I have one or two student brave enough to actually say aloud they want to become a teacher. Many more students secretly want to but fear a life of low wages. This despite my myriad examples of ways to make a good living after earning a teaching degree (including a recent NYT article that showed NYC teachers can make over $100,000).

My students’ inability to picture themselves having any kind of financial stability as teachers has to do with a lack of imagination. Teachers, they think, teach in a classroom. That’s it. And while this is arguably the most common path for a newly-minted teacher, it is not the only one.

This year, at SXSWedu, the conference on innovation in education that precedes the entertainment festival, I sat in on session after session hosted by educators who no longer work in the classroom but whose time there was essential to later success. They work in consulting, education technology, and philanthropy. Many started in the classroom, later taking those skills into adjacent services. Some stay within school districts but in new roles, as in-house researchers developing new assessment and diagnostic tools or administrators expanding the reach and impact of career-readiness programs. Some become curriculum designers working behind the scenes to refresh the content used in classrooms and on screens. And industry liaisons are needed now more than ever to facilitate partnerships to ensure students have work-based learning opportunities.

Everyone is obsessed with durable, transferable skills right now, and the most innovative school districts are hiring talented individuals to apply their teaching acumen to designing the curriculum that will future-proof their students. Educators now bear the burden of emphasizing what durable skills are and how they are transferrable across contexts.

But going into teaching with the goal of eventually leaving the classroom for some other “education services” job isn’t the main message here; the role of teacher may become even more valuable in an AI-dominant future, though it may look different than what you remember from 5th grade.

One resounding message from SXSWedu was educators are going to be needed beyond the k12 classroom role; as the pace of technology accelerates, workers will need to more frequently “up-skill” throughout their careers, taking more off ramps to learn new skills before returning to their career highway at full speed. This means post-secondary, continuing education instructors will be in high demand in the near future. You can already see these jobs popping up with the “bright future” rating on ONETonline.org, the US Department of Labor’s jobs database.

In an interview with Jasmine Sun for the New York Times, Jack Clark, British journalist, co-founder of Anthropic, and head of the Anthropic Institute, optimistically pointed out that AI will allow us to “‘Expand the share of human labor’ in relational roles like nursing and teaching.” Rather than going into customer service - a role easily replaced by AI, someone’s relational skills can be harnessed in teaching - a job that is arguably more fulfilling and where “human presence matters more.”

“What AI should allow us to do,” Clark went on, “is pay these jobs more and massively multiply the number of them.” Whether that actually will happen, however, depends on the few companies where the wealth is concentrated to “deliver on the money side.”

While I’m generally pessimistic about AI optimists, especially those claiming human labor will be protected as their technology makes them billions (in part because it’s replacing expensive humans), I do think Clark may be highlighting something worth celebrating. Teachers have generally been paid disproportionately less than their undeniable value and necessity should warrant, and AI may actually underscore their real worth. If the funding follows, so will the talent, filling a pipeline that has been sparse for too long.

Who knows, maybe teacher education programs will become the new business- finance programs on college campuses, with only the most competitive and enthusiastic students gaining admission.