Public Thread: Teaching As A Business Skill

Photo by Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash

During my conversation with Kate Rogers earlier this week, I was struck by her ability to transfer a mentorship ethos from academe to industry. Kate’s work with research teams for Zillow echoes the sense of belonging in an academic department (a healthy one, at least). And her why as both teacher and manager is simply stated: helping people get to where they want to go.

I remember that feeling as a teacher and advisor. It’s why I’m presently focused on building my coaching practice, because it’s the closest approximation that I’ve found to the classroom. In fact, my coaching often exceeds the rewards of traditional teaching. I can’t count the hours I spent coaxing reluctant students through paper conferences, often offering feedback that went unheeded. Coaching is much more collaborative. As one of my recent clients wrote to me after our last session, “the book coach helps the writer decide where they really want to go and helps them figure out how best to get there with what they’ve got to offer.” That is so much more fulfilling than trying to convince someone that they ought to want their writing to go somewhere, and that things like grades will naturally flow from that motivation.

There is no grading in coaching, which is one thing I love about it.

But I want to unpack something Kate said about teaching. This came near the end of a series of her suggestions for translating academic experience into industry terms:

Teaching is huge, because when you're teaching you've learned to communicate to a different audience. That is exactly what you're doing in industry. If you know how to tailor to one audience, you can learn to tailor to the other audiences. So I really encourage people to highlight that piece and how that is effective and useful for them. Because a lot of times when you go academia to industry, you know how to do kind of the hard skills of the job. What you're learning to do is be in business and work in that way. And if you have a track record of, well, I know how to change in this way to meet this need, you can probably do it again.

This feels self-evident: teachers are communicators who are skilled at explaining complex material to non-expert audiences, specifically to undergraduates who might wish they were sleeping or playing Call of Duty rather than sitting in class. But there is some sleight of hand here, because teaching is much more than tailoring content. And the leap from academe to industry would not be so difficult for so many people if “learning [how] to be in business and work in that way” were straightforward.

A few weeks ago, Fawzi Abou-Chahine suggested that the trick to reframing academic experience for industry employers is to recognize the skills that are relevant and also to identify what is *not* relevant for a particular role. I see Kate doing that here. The relevant part of teaching is tailoring content to multiple audiences: adapting communication to meet different needs. Someone who effectively leveraged teaching experience to land an industry role would thus need to shed all of the aspects of teaching that aren’t relevant to business.

This is a trick that I have not yet mastered. Here are a few things that teaching means to me, but that seem to carry less currency in business. Tell me where I’m wrong?

• Close reading: The purpose of examining a text is not to summarize it so much as to interrogate its meaning, and sometimes to probe its contradictions. Attentiveness to nuance and language might be valuable in drafting contracts or thinking through a marketing strategy. But absorbing what poems or novels might teach us about mortality or appreciating multiple layers of meaning in a text is really not the same as anticipating consumer behavior, is it?

• Critical thinking: As one reader wrote to me in private, a company like Zillow works directly against independent real-estate agents, sometimes eliminating jobs in rural places. Working for industry often requires suspending critical analysis of these externalities. But good teaching places no limits on critical analysis: nothing is immune from skepticism or critique. The business of thinking critically within certain parameters remains elusive to me.

• Lifelong learning: Much of what teachers chafe against is the intrusion of transactional attitudes into educational environments. The goal of good teaching is fostering ownership of learning. Kate says it well: “One of the most important values or things that I tried to actually train students to do was learning how to learn. And so I spent a lot of effort and time designing my courses so that they would learn how to learn, because I think that is one of the things that can best serve them forever.” I love that. Students who claim their own education are doing more than fulfilling a requirement for a credential. Presumably employers value people who go beyond the minimum, who chart their own learning arcs. But I can’t help thinking that self-directed learning is also constrained by certain parameters in industry. Learning how to learn about history is not as valuable in business as learning how to learn about coding or email marketing, because history doesn’t solve an obvious business problem. If so, then lifelong learning for its own sake is another aspect of teaching that must be stamped as *not relevant*, or at least not entirely relevant, while translating academic experience into industry terms.

• Mystery: Much buzz has been made of late about evidence-based teaching methods, but talented teachers continue to flee higher ed. I suspect this owes in part to corporate indifference to mystery, and a preference for more predictable outcomes. But mystery lies at the heart of a teacher’s lifelong pilgrimage in the craft. Teaching perpetually humbles us; this is one of its joys. Why did the exact same lesson plan soar in one period and bomb in the period directly after? (Could even the most skilled UX research team pin this down?) How do you find the switch that flips a reluctant learner into a passionate one? What is the proper balance between structuring a learning experience and leaving more dots for learners to connect for themselves? If a corporatized university is uninterested in these questions, it seems unlikely that actual corporations care about them either, except as levers to pull to convert more sales.

Questions:

• How would you translate teaching as a business skill?

• Is “student” interchangeable with “customer” or “client”? And is that a premise one must accept in order to translate teaching experience as a business asset?

• Which aspects of teaching would you identify as most relevant to industry?

• Which aspects of teaching might you flag as irrelevant to industry (and how might you feel while doing so)?

• How might your own reflections compare with those I’ve offered above, or with Kate’s story from Tuesday?