Education career: becoming a teacher or an instructor
Starting an education career is not easy, but a teacher is one of the safest jobs in the World. Whatever new breakthrough or change there will come, there will be a need for teachers and instructors who will be able to teach the rest of us about it. Once associated only with a job of schoolteacher, education career offers now much, much more than that, especially in the everchanging IT business.
What do you need to pursue education career?
There are two kinds of prerequisites for an education career – psychological and practical. While you can always learn the latter, the first ones are much harder to achieve. First, you have to be incredibly patient and calm. Then, you have to know how to gain attention of your students and be self-confident enough to know when to say “I don't know”. Being professional and emotionally stable is so obvious that we don't even need to really mention it.
The latter, practical skills are simply the amount of knowledge and skills you are to teach. If you're thinking about becoming a schoolteacher, you will certainly need a lot of education and certainly a university degree related to your field. If you're going to pursue a career of an instructor in some specific area (and not a schoolteacher), it will be your experience that will be the most important. As you see, the education career can take from the very beginning two alternate routes – a schoolteacher or an instructor.
How to start
Whatever way you choose, you will need some certification to back you up. Whether it'll be one of Microsoft's IT instructor certification for IT courses or a MD for being a schoolteacher, every education career has to start from taking part in a course. Even in such areas as computers, where your personal experience is what counts most, the certification is still a huge plus. Remember that the course won't concentrate on the subject you are to teach, but on the very techniques or learning and teaching, as well as on shaping your personal attitude to other people. However, it will take you several lessons before you will know if the education career is the one for you. Only when you experience the constant stress and responsibility for you students, you will know if pursuing the education career was the right thing to do.
