From Classroom Teacher to Remote Curriculum Designer: A Composite Timeline

Composite, as with the other case studies on this blog. The details come from several people who made this move; no single person had exactly this run, but the shape repeats.

The starting position

Thirty-four. Nine years teaching secondary school English in Ibadan. A B.Ed, a national teaching certificate, and a folder of lesson notes going back to her first term.

Her opening line to us was that she had "no transferable skills" and would need to learn something entirely new, probably coding, probably at night, probably for a year.

Weeks one and two: naming what already existed

She had written schemes of work for three year groups. She had built assessments and marking rubrics. She had adapted material for pupils at very different levels in one room. She had trained four new teachers on the departmental scheme.

Every one of those has a name in the international market: curriculum design, assessment design, differentiated instruction, instructional design, learning objectives, training delivery.

She had never used a single one of those phrases. Those phrases are what the job adverts search for.

The role she had never heard of was Instructional Designer — the person who builds the training and onboarding material inside companies. It is a large, well-paid, heavily remote field, and a substantial share of the people in it used to be teachers.

Week three: the real gap

There was one and it was genuine. Everything she had made was on paper or in Word. The market builds in authoring tools and works to a documented design model.

She spent about two weeks on the free tier of an authoring tool and read enough about ADDIE to describe her own existing process in its vocabulary — which is mostly what learning that model consists of, for someone who has been doing it for nine years.

Weeks four and five: proof

She could not publish school material. So she built one thing from scratch: a twenty-minute onboarding module for a fictional company's customer support team.

Learning objectives at the front. A short scenario. Three knowledge checks. A one-page design document explaining why it was structured that way and what she would measure afterwards.

That design document mattered more than the module. Anyone can assemble slides. The document showed she thought about learning as a design problem, which is the actual job.

Weeks six to eleven: applying

Small and mid-sized companies with distributed teams and no dedicated learning function — the ones that need onboarding built and have nobody to build it. Around eight to ten applications a week, roughly half through direct messages to heads of people and operations.

Four weeks of silence. Then three conversations inside eight days, which is the pattern almost everyone reports and almost nobody expects.

The interview she lost

Asked how she would measure whether a training module worked, she described a quiz score. They wanted to hear about behaviour change on the job — did support tickets get resolved faster afterwards.

She wrote out the better answer that evening. She was asked a near-identical question eleven days later.

Week twelve

Offer from a US-based software company, fully remote, contractor, $2,300 a month to build and maintain their customer onboarding programme.

Roughly three and a half times what she was earning, for work that used the same instincts she had been using since her first term — assessed, this time, by a market that knew what to call it.

Two years on

Salaried at the same company at about $3,600, leading a team of two, and doing occasional freelance curriculum work for an education non-profit.

What actually mattered

• Nine years of directly relevant experience that had never been named correctly
• One real gap, closed in a fortnight with free material
• One built artefact, with the reasoning written down beside it
• Twelve weeks, including four weeks of silence and one interview she lost

Translating experience the market cannot currently see is the single most common blockage we deal with, and it is what Stage 4 exists to solve. Cohort 10 closes Sunday 30 August. See the stages →