OBSTACLES: Opportunities to educate others about the contributions that an educated, business professional who has given time as a public servant in the capacity of a teacher/educator actually is better at the IT craft now than before they went to teach.
EDUCATION: Teaching is so much more than knowing a particular content and telling others about it. As a society, we have lumped teachers into this mode of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" mentality.
A professional educator is one who can do and is able to empower others to be able to do. A professional educator is also one who has significantly enhanced management skills and interpersonal communications skills as they are a requisite in minute-to-minute discourse in and out of the classroom.
As for the ability to be a project manager, teachers have unmovable dates and have to maintain the flexibility to get in everything that's important within the constraints and to work with all of the resources to make it happen. Instead of project plans, we have more detailed, lesson plans.
As for the ability to be a business analyst, teachers are the apex of elicitation skills. A teacher questions to the nth degree to ascertain each individual student's comprehension or lack thereof. A teacher is also able to provide various solutions to a problem; this is especially true in mathematics.
Documentation templates may look a little different, but let's face it, every IT shop within every business has a different template than any other business entity. Documents are geared toward the audience that utilizes it. When someone moves between one position to another, there is a learning curve on the specifics of the documentation. However, the many years of experiences are still very much engrained into our brain.
When someone is hired for a position, do they walk into the job knowing everything? I dare say, no! In my 30+ years in the workforce, I have never seen one person who had all knowledge to do all things. But rather, the person who has shown the ability to "figure it out" was the person who contributed most to the completion of whatever the objective was determined to be.
Someone who has the ability and the motivation to be a learner is the person who will get the job done. One who can easily and willingly learn will be the one who has the ability to lead!
Food for thought!
