Transferable Skills For TEFL Teachers

If you’re thinking about changing jobs or careers, you might be wondering how teaching English as a foreign language has helped you grow professionally. Let us introduce you to transferable skills!

Transferable skills are the abilities you develop that aren’t specific to one job or industry. They are the additional skills that you develop along the way. When it comes to starting a new career, particularly in a completely different field, we often overlook how our current position can benefit us. 

In this post, we look at the various skills you will develop during your time as a TEFL teacher and explain how these can be used to set you up for success in your next professional role.

Transferable skills for TEFL teachers

Organisational skills

Teachers are constantly keeping track of multiple students, classes, and lesson materials. When you look even closer, that doesn’t cover half of it! It also involves managing registers, tracking students’ progress, juggling deadlines, and keeping detailed records of everything you do.  

To put it simply, a teacher’s organisational skills are nothing short of impressive. But being organised doesn’t just benefit you as a teacher. Many employers look for candidates who possess good organisational skills. This is because they want someone who will complete work efficiently, especially for positions in administration, HR, or office management. Luckily, your time in the classroom sets you apart from your competition and equips you with the skills you’ll need.

Planning skills

Teachers excel at planning. You need to ensure that lessons run smoothly and that you are on track with the curriculum. These only come with careful planning. Typically, your classes are prepared well in advance so that you meet specific goals and deadlines. Additionally, lesson planning teaches you how to be proactive. Part of the process includes foreseeing potential issues and creating backup plans ahead of time. These skills would benefit you in areas such as:

• Administration
• Project management
• Operations
• Strategy development

Read more: Top Tips For Effective Lesson Planning

Communication skills

Many people get nervous about talking in front of an audience and sometimes they are held back by their fear of public speaking. As for you, you’ll be used to facing groups of children and adults of different ages and levels. This makes giving presentations a breeze. 

But public speaking isn’t the only thing, teaching also improves your basic communication skills. You learn how to explain complex ideas, offer feedback, and give instructions. In addition, you also pick up how to read the room and how to choose the right language for your audience. These are all vital parts of communication that many people take years to develop. 

If you’re considering a job in the training sector, management, or events coordination, you can rest assured that you have the right skills for the job.

Problem-solving skills

While teaching English as a foreign language, you have to frequently come up with new ways to entertain your students. What’s more, you also need to:

• Assist students with any difficulties they face
• Resolve any technical issues you may experience while teaching 
• Make sure your lessons run as smoothly as possible

Doing the above strengthens your problem-solving skills, which is a good ability to have both personally and professionally. Being able to troubleshoot issues benefits you both personally and professionally, no matter which career path you may choose. 

Time management skills

As a teacher, you have to make sure that all the activities and content you need to teach fit within your lesson time. You can’t go too quickly or you’ll be left with too much spare time and you can’t work so slowly that you don’t complete the lesson. As a result, you are an expert at managing your time and estimating how long tasks will take. Time management skills and the ability to stick to timeframes are useful traits to possess if you want to work in a corporate setting or the training sector.

Digital skills

Since many workplaces rely on the internet and computers, being digitally literate is an advantage. Luckily, a large part of teaching English as a foreign language involves using technology in some way. This could be through interactive games, presentation tools, and online flashcards, to name a few. As a result, you’ll be familiar with a wide range of software and know your way around a computer.  This makes you a strong candidate for virtually any role as digital skills are highly sought after in every industry. 

Cross-cultural skills

With remote work becoming the norm, many businesses are hiring staff from all over the world. In turn, employers are seeing a need for employees that can understand and respect various perspectives and backgrounds. 

As a TEFL teacher, you are used to teaching students of various nationalities. Not to mention, that many of your teaching colleagues also come from different parts of the world. This means that you’re already adept at building relationships and collaborating with people across cultures. In today’s workplace, this experience puts you at an advantage as well as open doors to the international job market.

Read more: Navigating Culture Shock: My Real Experience Teaching English In Vietnam

While TEFL can be a career in itself, it’s very common for teachers to move onto another profession after gaining some teaching experience. Luckily, the skills you develop during your time teaching are yours to take with you wherever you go. Always remember, that what you learn along the way are professional assets that will serve you well in any career you choose.

Read more: The Different Jobs of a TEFL Teacher

Author Bio

Written by

Claire Herbert

Edited by Kirsten Colquhoun

Claire Herbert is a TEFL-certified writer and course content developer for The TEFL Academy. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Languages (Spanish and English) from the University of Pretoria. Although her early experiences involved tutoring English literature at the university and hosting conversational English classes, Claire has now switched to developing courses and educational content to help train new TEFL teachers around the world. Read Claire Herbert's story →