Beyond the ivory tower: why content strategy is the ideal field for ex-academics
Teaching has never been easy. But over the last three years, the challenges facing teachers — lack of funding, political overreach into curricula, the pressures of the COVD-19 pandemic, poor conditions and pay — have resulted in an exodus from the industry.
According to the National Education Association, as of February 2022, “55 percent of educators are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned,” a figure that may increase as the cycle of exiting teachers results in more work, more stress, and more burnout for those who remain.
Of course, the ideal state would be to improve the system that teachers exist within. Increase pay. Increase state funding. Stand up protections against political pressure. Provide easy access to mental health and emotional support for students and faculty members so they can survive, if not thrive.
The sad reality is that it will take years of intentional reform to fix the structural realities of teaching.
In the meantime, though, we need to be asking a few questions that deserve way more attention:
What should teachers transitioning out of teaching do next?
What fields should they be looking at? How should they think about the years of valuable experience they have garnered through teaching through the lens of other fields? What transferable skills should employers be aware of in ex-teacher candidates? What other fields might be as fulfilling to teachers as instructing students?
I can’t speak to every field that would make for a soft landing for an ex-teacher. What I can do is speak to my story as an ex-teacher, an ex-academic, and now as a professional in user experience (both as a content strategist and as a UX manager), and the ways that content strategy in particular is an ideal career path for those with teaching experience.
Out of education, into user experience
So, my career journey in [very] brief. My first job after college was in teaching high school, a job that transitioned into a decade-long career in instruction: first as a Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, then as a college lecturer in the same department. By the time I started my first job as a Senior Content Strategist, my main work experience was as an educator.
With that history in mind, my pivot into UX (and into content strategy) might first seem like a hard right-hand turn. But these fields share more in common with education than we might first expect.
Let me walk you through three of the most critical shared commitments across content strategy and teaching that demonstrate why the field is an ideal one for ex-teachers to pursue.
Shared commitment #1: the value of progressive disclosure
When you’re immersed in an academic field on a day-to-day basis, designing a course becomes especially tricky. What feels like common or intuitive knowledge often is not, beyond small circles of other advanced students or faculty members. And that means that educators need to be especially mindful about laying the right amount of groundwork when teaching about a topic.
In teaching US history and culture, I couldn’t come in hot on day one digging into the nuances of the Frankfurt School of cultural studies or the relationship between antebellum America and the Lost Cause mythology. That approach would have left my students confused at best, and shut down at worst, because those weren’t concepts that they were necessarily familiar with.
So I instead structured my courses according to the principle of progressive disclosure. I scaffolded my lectures and introduced my students to the complexities of American cultural history step-by-step. After laying each piece of foundational groundwork, I could move on to more complex information, confident that I was bringing my students along with the ride.
Had I not built the course content with progressive disclosure in mind, they quickly would have become overwhelmed with all of the information in front of them. And, as we’ve learned from cognitive psychology, when individuals are overwhelmed with too much information, they’re not able to process it.
Shared commitment #2: the value of plain language
Plain, straightforward language is one of the most important elements of accessible UX content. There’s an obvious reason for that: users should understand the content they’re consuming. There’s also a less obvious reason for that: plain language implicitly strengthens users’ engagement with the content.
18F, the US Government’s Digital Service Consultancy, critiques the use of jargon because it hampers both comprehension and connection:
“…going beyond necessary technical terms to write in jargon can cause misunderstanding or alienation, even if your only readers are specialists.”
Similarly, in teaching, I would be doing my students no favors if I stood in front of the lecture hall and spoke in the same academic jargon that was challenging for even me to comprehend as a Ph.D. student. They not only would be less equipped to understand the course material; they would also risk being turned off from learning in the field longer term.
A core part of my job as a university lecturer was to simplify that notoriously complex language into something that anyone in my classroom could understand and believe what I was communicating to them. That’s also what content strategy is all about.
Shared commitment #3: the value of empathizing with our end users
The UX adage “we are not our users” likewise applies to education. Educators in the classroom (teachers, lecturers, fully tenured professors) are not their end users (their students). And, as a result, they need to step outside of their own points of view and empathize with their students in order to teach them effectively.
Within UX, empathizing with users is required to design experiences that meet their needs. We use a variety of tools, from interviews to empathy maps, to identify how we might meet users’ needs. We avoid assuming that what we as UX professionals expect is the same as our users.
That same spirit undergirds teaching. At the university, I taught broad and diverse groups of students: they had different levels of background knowledge, different learning styles, and different strengths and weaknesses. I would have done them an enormous disservice if I taught them based on my own point of view or my own style of learning.
Or, more bluntly, I’d be a terrible teacher if I taught without first empathizing with my students.
So, to avoid being a terrible teacher, I asked a lot of questions of them (and myself) to design lectures and seminars that would meet their needs. What were their interests? Their majors? What other courses were they taking that were occupying their time? What past experiences in education were they bringing to the table? What skillsets did they feel strongest or weakest in? What didn’t I know about them that might shape how they engaged in the classroom?
Engaging in these moments of reflection served as a critical reminder that my students were not just empty vessels for information. They were individuals with different bodies of experience that fundamentally shaped how they engaged with the content in front of them. That’s likewise been a critical lesson in my career in content strategy.
A final word
Fundamentally, both content strategists and teachers help others understand information — however complicated it is. There’s a natural affinity between educators and UX/UI designers, content strategists, and UX researchers.
In reflecting on my journey, my hope will always be that teachers don’t feel forced out of a career path now characterized by overwork, low pay, and political attacks. But, barring that, my hope is that the teachers who are no longer willing to tolerate exhaustion and burnout can find a soft landing in another field like content strategy — in a role that affords them fair pay, fulfillment, and deserved appreciation.