Leaving the Classroom: A Transitioning Teacher Podcast

Leaving the Classroom 47: Teacher to Project Manager Melissa Chapman Discusses Skills Transfer and Career Growth

In this episode of Leaving the Classroom, host Kristi Oliva interviews former teacher Melissa Chapman about her transition to a career in project management.

Tune in to hear:

• Melissa's journey from burnout in teaching to becoming a certified project manager.
• How teachers can translate their skills and experience on their resume for roles in project management.
• Advice for teachers on gaining clarity about their career goals and tailoring their resumes and LinkedIn profiles for specific roles outside of education.

 Listen to the episode here:

Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn

Connect with Kristi on LinkedIn

This podcast is sponsored by IDOL Courses and is the only authorized vocational school and implementation program of its kind that not only shows you exactly how to create your job application assets and build a portfolio from scratch, but also includes credentials, mentorship, expert coaching, and paid experience opportunities in corporate instructional design and online learning for life! Learn more about the program here. 

Enjoy the podcast transcription:

Kristi Oliva

Welcome to Leaving the Classroom. This is a podcast for teachers who are ready to transition out of the classroom and into a new career. Each week, I'll share stories about what I've learned moving from education to the corporate world. I'll answer the most common questions and share my best tips to help you get started. If you are considering leaving the classroom, this show is for you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Leaving the Classroom. I'm Kristi Oliva. I'm so glad you're here. Today I'm talking to Melissa Chapman, former teacher turned project manager. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa Chapman 

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Kristi Oliva 

I know just for everybody who's listening. We recorded a podcast episode several months ago, I lost it. So we're back again but it actually works out really well because we've got so much more exciting stuff to talk about. And so I'm really looking forward to getting into it. But let's start Melissa with just your teacher career and your journey. Tell us where you started and how you got out.

Melissa Chapman 

Okay, so I am in Oregon, and was a middle school teacher, middle school, Spanish and social studies and my first year of teaching was during COVID. So anyone who taught during COVID that was in rough time for everyone, and spent a few years teaching and was just at a point where it just wasn't feeling sustainable for me. I've got three kids at home. Well now five, and so was just really in a place where I needed something different and so as most teachers feel all the things right, burnt out, spending every waking moment, weekend's holidays, feeling like the guilt of I should be working on something, I should be lesson planning, I should be grading. I should get caught up, right? All those shoulds. And so I just got to the point where I didn't know what to do and so I started Googling. "What can teachers do instead of teach?" I mean, I just had no clue where I could go and so I was looking at copywriting because I enjoy writing. And through that experience was listening to podcasts just like this one, and found project management and realized pretty quickly that project management not only fit my skill sets, but are things that I really enjoy doing, and also was already doing in teaching a lot of those things, the things that I was really still enjoying about teaching, really connected with that. And so I started looking into that. Pretty quickly started doing some upskilling. I realized that I could get a PMP, which is a Project Management Professional certification. A lot of teachers don't think they can get that because you have to have 36 months of project management experience but I have great news for teachers thinking about project management, you can get the PMP with teaching experience. So a school year is a project. So anyway, so I got to my PMP. It's a whole process, you actually have to apply to even be eligible to take the exam. You have to prove you have the experience. You have to have some education hours and so went through that whole process. In that whole process definitely dealt with impostor syndrome at different times wondering if I really could make this pivot and did a lot of iterations on my resume at the same time. You know I had my teacher resume at the beginning of that process and you know you quickly realize when you get on LinkedIn and start applying for jobs, just how different a teacher resume is than anywhere else. I actually saw something. Someone posted this the other day and it made so much sense to me that a teacher resume traditionally is all about all the soft skills and all of the extra things that we participate in and we want to show on a resume, I volunteered for this committee, and I did this and it's almost like, here's a list of all the ways that I'm overworked. Right? And so, it's a lot about those soft skills and volunteering in this committee and that and a lot of the extra responsibilities that teachers take on but a corporate resume or a non education resume is almost the opposite. It's less about what are the job responsibilities and more about the specific accomplishments. So it is such a paradigm shift, to have to change your resume, right, from a teacher resume to something totally different. So that took a lot of time and thinking and being proactive in figuring out how do I translate my teacher resume into a project manager resume and it took time. I got there and once I kind of found the sweet spot where I had a highlight section and really used project management language in my resume. I started making a lot of progress with interviews, and eventually a couple job offers. And now almost exactly a year ago started in my role. So I've been almost a year now as a project manager and I'm really happy.

Kristi Oliva 

Very cool. So I have a couple questions about that journey out. So first of all, how did you like get the confidence to say I bet you I can qualify for the PMP? Because now I know you help people get that confidence and actually do that. So what made you think, "Actually, you know what, I can do this."

Melissa Chapman 

As I was learning about what project management is, it just felt so natural. There were just so many light bulbs that were going on that Oh, teaching is a project. Like it just felt so clear to me that this is a project like, there are five phases of a project and the school year is all of those things. We initiate, we plan, we execute, we monitor and control, which is like grading and differentiating instruction and changing our lesson plans based on the progress of the students, right? And then the closing out at the end of the year. I mean, it just, to me, it was just so clearly obvious that this is a project. And so, and I had heard of other teachers that got their PMP, not a lot, but at the time. It's a lot more common I think just in the last year, I think partly because I'm screaming from the rooftops to get your PMP. Every time a teacher reaches out to me and we have a conversation about it. They're like, I'm considering the CAPM. So the CAPM is like the entry level Project Manager Certification. I'm like, no, no, no, you're skipping it, you're going straight to the PMP because you can. And so just getting the word out, it's just a knowledge. It's not by any fault of their own but it's just not... It hasn't been a common thing to tell teachers oh, go get your PMP. So I don't know if that answered your question but really just like doing research and realizing that that is what teachers do.

Kristi Oliva 

So in that same vein, something I see a lot that kind of makes me upset, let's be nice with my language. And I'm wondering how you feel about this but there's a lot of people who have never been a teacher, and they are very vocal on LinkedIn, about teachers making sure that you say you're a teacher and do not say that you are anything else. And to me, I get very upset about that, because teachers are so many things. And so how do you deal with the teachers you're helping, who are hesitant to put Project Manager on their resume and change that language? Because maybe they are hearing these outside voices saying, that's a lie. You can't do that, because you didn't actually project manage. When I...  I mean I have the opposite opinion that...

Melissa Chapman 

Yeah.

Kristi Oliva 

That's exactly what you've done so put the language that you are claiming.

Melissa Chapman 

You know, I have mixed feelings about it. I would say that I... my resume that I used to get the job I have now I didn't actually change the job title. It actually still said, dual language, social studies teacher, whatever it was, but every single thing on my entire resume... and I've used this phrase before, but it's because a recruiter told me this, screamed project management. So I had a project management highlight section. Every bullet point, every experience was about... was project management, I initiated this project. I used all the language about scope, like a KPI, and I like used all the language to show all of the phases of a project as my accomplishments. I had metrics built in. So everything was very clearly through the lens of project management. So that it was very clear that, you know, I was using project management as that lens. So what I mean is, for example, like what I tell people, what I tell teachers is if you are applying for a project management role, your resume is going to look completely different than if you're applying for an L&D or an Instructional Design or a finance job. Because what you're going to do is extract the parts of the experience you have, which we all know teachers have so many different skills, but you're not going to list them all. You're going to list the things that make sense for that role. So for me, I pulled out the things that were like data analysis. How did I examine data and then change my plans based on that. That's what a project manager does. So those are the types of things that I pulled out to make it really clear I have the skills that a project manager has. So I didn't have to change my job title on mine because I just made sure that everything was so clearly pointing to project management that even though, yes, I was a teacher, I had project management-like abilities and skills. So that's kind of my idea on that. I did change... there was one job title that I changed slightly because job titles are so nuanced between companies, right? And so it was at a nonprofit, and my job title was representative, country representative, but I was actually a country director. And that's very much more like corporate speech, which would make more sense to most people. But generally, I've kept the job title and just made sure that my bullet points very clearly articulated all of those skills.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, I don't think we're necessarily on different pages because I'm not leading people to try to fool anyone.

Melissa Chapman 

Yeah.

Kristi Oliva 

The way I tell them is it's just... you're just translating what you've done into something that they can easily understand that you can fulfill the role. And what you said was really interesting. I think teachers want to include every single thing they've ever done on their resume. And so sometimes I have to tell them, you know, I don't think anybody's gonna care you were teacher of the year unless you can tell me why they should care but they're so proud of that accomplishment. And so I think that's a good example, though, that a teacher could have probably five different resumes, if they really wanted to. I mean, I wouldn't recommend it because that means you're focusing on five things. But like, you could have easily applied to L&D roles, but your resume would have looked different, but you still would have been equally qualified for that. And your resume would have been tailored to those more creative learning development things. 

Melissa Chapman 

Yes, and I actually did have two resumes for a little while. I had a customer success resume because I was applying for Customer Success roles. And I had a project manager resume because I had slightly different things on it. Or, if I was applying for a role that had a client facing component, there were certain things about some of my previous experience before teaching that I made sure to include because it was client facing. I wanted to show that I had customer service experience but on other project manager roles where it was very internal, like that wasn't necessary. So I definitely had two different. One for a little while, when I was going back and forth between, is it customer success? Or should I do project management? Because they had very different like information, but they were the exact same jobs on both. It was just how I extracted the experience.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, I think that's super important to just highlight again, and again, for teachers, you will have to cut some stuff off your resume, that might be painful, because the key is relevancy. How relevant is it to the new role that you are pursuing? So thank you for that.

Melissa Chapman 

It is painful to take off the teaching license and unless it's an L&D role, or instructional design, where they actually like having that you were a teacher previously. For me, it was painful that I had worked very hard to get my Spanish endorsement and to take that off my resume just felt... I mean, I had bilingual somewhere but to take that off felt so painful because of the blood, sweat and tears that that took. But having my teaching license on my resume wasn't doing me any favors and wasn't actually helping and so I took it off.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, I mean, I would compare it to, you know, if you had some sort of medical license, but you were applying to Project Management or Learning and Development, like nobody cares. You're getting... somebody might care but are they going to say, well, but they have the medical license, should we hire them? They're not going to care about that for that role. So you have to keep that in mind, as painful as it is to take those things off. Okay, so let's talk more about project management. You've talked a lot about how the teacher role transitions. So can you walk us through? I know, there's no typical day, but like, if you had to tell... or when you describe to teachers, what is the project manager do day in day out? Tell us more about that?

Melissa Chapman 

Yeah, a lot of communication, a lot of staying organized. You know, a project manager, really the the role of a project manager is to help push a project forward. And so there's a lot of skills involved with that, that kind of are like pushing things forward with students in their learning. So there's a lot of crossover there and so it's a lot of... there's emotional intelligence that I have to use when I'm working with teams and trying to, you know, I have teams that are very independent and really good at their job. They're subject matter experts in their thing, and I'm trying to bring this whole team together to accomplish this project and so I have to use a lot of those skills. So I'll do meetings, I have like weekly status calls with a client. My job is a client facing role but I also work with my teams internally. A lot of just following up with teams. So I use Asana as my project management software and so I'm constantly like updating that. Checking in on deadlines. I'll start my morning, you know, with emails and just checking on anything that needs to be kind of focused on for that day. Putting out which fires have emerged and then I do spend a lot of time on calls. Like I said, sometimes it's individually with team members. Sometimes it's with the client, sometimes it's status calls, kickoff calls. So yeah, it is different every day.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, I love that though. That's one thing I love about being a Program Manager. It's so different everyday, but sometimes that can be... sometimes it can be difficult, too. Okay, so let's narrow that down then. Let's just, three top skills, give me, that teachers could easily pull and bring into not only their resume and their interview, but right onto the job. What's serving you well, as a former teacher?

Melissa Chapman 

Organization is huge. You have to be organized because again, I'm managing so many different people and processes and things and so constantly having to know where everything is that. That each person is doing and so I have checklists. I have lists with lists. I use a lot of software. I have all kinds of different ways that I manage a lot of different pieces. So you have to be able to do that. One of the biggest transferable skills I see is context switching. Teachers are constantly having to switch, especially when I was teaching middle school, right? Every 44 minutes, I had a different class with a different group of students, sometimes a different subject, because I taught three different subjects at once. And so, I mean, every 44 minutes you're switching contexts. And that's the same with project management, I'll be on a call, and then I have to switch to a different call and then I have to stop and answer emails. And then I'm over here, someone's pinging me. And so being able to kind of multitask but also multitask well, and give all of those things the right amount of attention. I think teachers can do that well, because we are often having to be dealing with 30 different people asking for 30 different things. So that's a big one. Communication I already mentioned a little bit, but like, man, I just do a lot of communicating. Knowing how to synthesize information and drill it down to its core essence. I'll be on an hour long call and I need to be able to synthesize that and to hear the main points of this and be able to communicate that really effectively to like maybe a project sponsor or a stakeholder. And so, communicating and knowing what information is the right information to pass along, and what's like not helpful, so kind of that. And then emotional intelligence, again, is huge, because you're managing people. You're not just managing projects, you're managing people who are doing the project and so you have to have... You know, you're gonna have conflict, because it's people. You're gonna have people with differing opinions, and you're gonna have people that are really bad at meeting deadlines, and you're gonna have people that have a disagreement on how you run your meetings, and all these things. And so having to have that emotional intelligence, and then for a project manager, one of the hard parts about that is that most of the people on my team, they don't... no one reports directly to me. They all have their own managers and supervisors, right? And so, there's this like, this ability, you have to have to kind of orchestrate this team without actually being their manager, right? So there's a lot of that. You have to learn how to get their buy in and how to like, kind of build rapport with them so that they are in a place where they want to work with you. So a lot of that.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, those are good ones. Okay, so let's talk about the event coming up here in June, teacher ditch day. I'm so excited about this. If you want to know more about it, please visit the previous episode but Melissa is going to be one of our guest speakers, which is so exciting. So you get to learn a lot more about Project Management. So I don't know, tell us a little bit about what you're going to be revealing to people and what they can expect from you specifically at Teacher Ditch Day.

Melissa Chapman 

Absolutely! Yeah, I'm so excited about this and just again, my... having come from education, I'm just really passionate about helping teachers. I am all for the education system working and working well, because I have children in it and want it to work well. I also know that there are teachers who it's just not the right place for them to be right now. And so I definitely help coach transitioning teachers and people pivoting into project management. It's kind of like my love language right now and so really enjoying doing that. And so just helping, you know, we talked earlier about the resume, how important that resume is and helping teachers specifically translate that language into where they're heading. I think that's going to be really a key thing that a lot of teachers are just learning. If you're new to the idea of leaving education. LinkedIn is a whole new world. Like there's do's and don'ts with LinkedIn that, you know, teachers get on and I think they think it's Facebook and they use it like Facebook as like their running diary of their entire like job search process. And then like every potential hiring manager can see everything you post like you gotta have a little bit of like intentionality behind... it's a professional, you know, social media. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question.

Kristi Oliva 

I mean maybe I didn't do a good enough job but...

Melissa Chapman 

I'm just trying to think about this specifically.

Kristi Oliva 

Yeah, so for Teacher Ditch Day we'll have all the people on and so what Melissa is going to be sharing is going to be unique to her because what's cool is we are going to have all these different roles. So Melissa will be the only project manager and then we will have at least five or six other roles represented and so you're going to learn a lot about what role is going to fit best for you and so obviously you got a rundown in this episode, but you'll get that one... not the one on one but that live time with Melissa. And on that note we are going to have some giveaways at Teacher Ditch Day so I don't know if you want to mention what yours are and then tell people how they can use your services if they want to even get in touch with you before Teacher Ditch Day. How can they find you and get what those services are? Tell us what they are and where they can find them.

Melissa Chapman 

Absolutely. So of course LinkedIn is always a great place. I have everything linked there. I also have a Topmate account, which is where I do my one-on-one coaching. I also have some digital products like by eBook that's about how to apply for the PMP application. For the giveaway, I'm giving away a free one-on-one session, which we can use for whatever a teacher wants. Whether that's just like figuring out next steps, gaining clarity, looking at the resume, whatever they want. I'm very excited about that. Yeah, all of that is... LinkedIn, Topmate, those are probably the best places.

Kristi Oliva 

Perfect. So if you go to her featured section of LinkedIn, you'll find a lot of links there. Or you can just wait around for Teacher Ditch Day and try to win those awesome prizes. So you told us the best way to get in touch with you is probably LinkedIn. I think we've covered it all. Is there anything else you want to share with teachers, maybe something motivational, or just anything to leave us off here?

Melissa Chapman 

Well, the other thing I didn't mention was, recently, I have been involved with bettercareer.org and the Project Management Accelerator Program, and I'm really excited about that because it is a way... Again, I mentioned earlier that to get your PMP, you have to get... you have to upskill, you have to learn the language, and you have to get 35 hours of education. So I've partnered with them over the last seven months. We've created an entire curriculum that helps anyone either pivoting into project management or wanting a career change to get those 35 hours and learn that language, and there are just so many excellent extra resources with one-on-one coaching and Q&A sessions with me. So I'm just super excited about that. So, um, that's something that just rolled out and I'm putting a lot of my energy into that right now. And really focusing on like the PMP application process, because I think that's something where there just isn't a lot of people out there that are focusing on that. For teachers, specifically, I think my advice that probably gets said a lot, but it's never said enough is to just make sure you have clarity on where you're heading to. I know a lot of people are like, I just want to get out of teaching. I don't know where I'm heading. That's okay, I've been there, we've all been there but before you dive into like doing a bunch of stuff with your resume and trying to do all of these things, you really need to know what is it that you're interested in, passionate about? What are the skills you have that you are excited about using in your next role? And get that clarity first, because as we talked about, like, the only way to design your resume in a way that speaks that language is to know what language you're trying to speak. And you can't do that without that clarity. And that's why I'm excited about the Teacher Ditch Day because there is going to be so many different types of roles. I think so many teachers limit themselves to like either Edtech or like Instructional Design. Or I have to go do something in teaching. Or they think that they can only work for education companies. And I'm like, I work for an HR company. I know nothing about the industry when I started. They hired me for my product management skills and I knew nothing about the industry. So you don't have to limit yourself to like education. Our skills can go so far beyond that.

Kristi Oliva 

So true. Exactly, and that's a great way to leave off. Thank you for joining us, Melissa. I'm so excited. Do you want to leave the classroom but you're not sure where to start? Well, I've got two resources for you take the free Leaving the Classroom career quiz at idolcourses.com/leavingtheclassroom. Then come to Teacher Ditch Day on June 3, 2024. I will be hosting, Melissa will be there. It's a three hour event to help teachers learn about all the roles that they are already qualified for. We will have roles represented from instructional design to EdTech to Project Management to Entrepreneur. This is a must-attend event if you are considering leaving the classroom, and especially if you're not sure where to go after that, sign up at idolcourses.com/teacherditchday. It's time to take control and make the career change that will change your life. It changed mine. See you next time.

Kristi Oliva 

That's all for this episode, but you can find more at idolcourses.com or subscribe to the podcast. If you are ready to leave the classroom, use my code classroom100 to get $100 off enrollment at IDOL courses Academy.

Send your stories or questions to [email protected] or share them with me on Instagram @leavingtheclassroom.