You’re 100% right. My wife has a masters degree in education and spent 7 years as an English teacher with 3 very different types of schools in different districts. She left to be an instructional designer (with zero experience in that field) and nearly doubled her salary overnight.
If America wants to take education seriously they need to stop screwing over teachers.
We live in a larger city in the the Midwest. Looked on indeed frequently and applied for a position at a privately owned - medium/large sized company that is headquartered in our city.
In terms of experience they were looking for 3 years of design and course curriculum. My wife had more of that, just in a different industry. Also required a bachelor’s degree and she had a masters in education. A lot of overlap skills but different titles.
It also helped that her hiring manager and two peers on the team were former teachers as well. Luck was definitely involved.
They did request sample work before one of her interviews. She YouTubed a walkthrough on how to use a free instructional design platform and threw something together. A lot of the skills and platform knowledge she has now was self taught through Google and YouTube.
Good luck to you and your wife. Teaching is a challenging career.
31-year-old teacher quit her job. Now she works at Costco—and boosted her income by 50%: ‘I've never been happier' (these are not feel good stories, this is sad) ( www.nbclosangeles.com )