How Educators Can Align Their Experience for Program Management Roles

Thank you for reading the EdSkipper, Skip’s newsletter about skipping from education to education-aligned careers. Every Saturday, I send out a list of curated remote jobs. Premium subscribers receive two additional emails a month. This is the first November premium newsletter edition and the second in a two-part series on Program Management.

Translating Your Skills for Program Management Roles

In the last newsletter, I unpacked the major responsibilities program managers take on: program implementation and operations, team management/training, program evaluation, and thought leadership. I also started to unpack the skills that showed up most frequently in the job descriptions I analyzed. In this newsletter, I’m shifting gears.

Instead of focusing on the job descriptions, I’m focusing on educator alignment with the tasks in the job description.

In other words, what are the specific skills you should highlight in your resume?

Before we dive into the details, I want to share why I think educators are program managers. The primary reason is that we’re big picture thinkers — we don’t just work on the immediate day-to-day level, we also work on a larger strategic level. We teach students but we also think about their overall educational process; we develop lessons but we organize them into units that are aligned with comprehensive subject-area expertise and state/federal standards; we teach, but we always think about how we teach (i.e. our professional learning and development).

If we isolate one part of our jobs — our teaching responsibilities — here’s how we could describe them in a programmatic sense:

• Program Planning: At the beginning of the year (semester, unit, etc), you determine goals and outlines for the coming year. Then you plan specific curriculum units to accomplish those goals, setting up timelines for content and assessments.

• Program Implementation: Your students arrive which is when you onboard them (and their families) and analyze existing student performance data to assess their individual needs. Throughout the year, you monitor their progress, making data-driven curriculum adjustments and regularly reporting on their progress. You also communicate regularly with families, manage IEPs, and perform similar ongoing tasks.

• Program Evaluation: While you assess student data regularly, at regular points during the year, you also evaluate whether your curriculum (aka the program) is accomplishing the goals you established at the beginning of the year. You use that data to make adjustments so that you accomplish the planned results.

So how do you succinctly communicate all that on a resume?!

What’s in this issue:

• Translating Your School-based Skills to Program Management Roles

  • Skills Analysis Quiz — answer a few questions, get targeted sample bullet points for your PM edskip (premium subscribers only)

  • How to Communicate your Communication Skills in your Resume (premium subscribers only)

• Book Club: Burnout: Unlocking the Stress Cycle (premium subscribers only)

• Ask Me Anything Sign-up (premium subscribers only)

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