Why majoring in education is a good career move | Daily Liberal

If you’re looking into university degrees and asking yourself what you should do for a career, and you found this article, honestly look no further.

The fact that you arrived here means that you’re thinking about a career in Education in some fashion, but you need a little convincing, something to tell you that this career move is actually right for you. Well, let’s take a look.

To start with, let’s ask the obvious question.

Do people with a Masters in Education earn more money? The short answer is yes.

Teachers with a bachelor’s degree earn less money than those with a Masters degree. But that’s obvious right? I mean, your base salary goes up based on qualification so as the minimum wage goes up so does your money right?

Well sure, but what you might not expect is that it applies to more than just teachers. School administrators, consultants, teaching specialists, corporate trainers, policy writers and a whole host of other professions earn more money simply by having a Masters in Education, so the short answer is absolutely yes, you will earn more money in any field where a background in education is valuable.

On top of that, having a Masters in Education makes you eligible for a lot more jobs than you might think.

Here’s a list of 43 jobs you can get with or are improved by a Masters in Education – and although this list is primarily American it applies pretty closely to what you can find if you look on Australian job-seeker websites.

Okay, but that’s a Masters in Education. What about a regular degree?

Well, that depends on a couple of things. Firstly according to the Department of Education most teachers a starting salary is about $78,397, with a maximum salary of around $125,850 – the latter of which can only be achieved with either the aforementioned Masters Degree or 10 years of experience.

The other thing it depends on is… if you’re a woman. Unfortunately in the last few years statistics have repeatedly shown that women are still paid less on average than men. In the legal profession, the difference was staggering.

Male barristers earned an average of $190k per year, meanwhile female barristers with identical qualifications and experience earned on average around $70k per year – literally less than a starting teacher’s salary.

What this means is that while there may be more lucrative careers out there in theory, in practice until the gender gap is resolved a career in teaching is one of the more reliable, higher paying jobs out there.

Despite everything you may have heard, teaching is a career with one of the highest rates of job satisfaction in the country. Australian data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) of 2018 revealed that 88 per cent of Australian teachers believed that the advantages of being a teacher far outweighed the disadvantages, and if given the choice, 83 per cent said they’d make the same choice again.

On top of that, 45 per cent of teachers stated that they felt that their community and society at large valued them for their efforts.

That may sound bad, but the international average for that particular question is 26 per cent and in both Australia and International data sets the rates of feeling socially valued were much higher for young teachers than old teachers, in particular those still within the first five years of their career.

Of course, job satisfaction is also largely dependent on the existing culture of your work environment. Some workplaces are better than others, and there are certainly some downsides to teaching. The highest reported downsides were:

For the most part, these factors correlated strongly with matters of stress and mental health. In a recent study from Sweden, the study concluded that “…aspects of school working conditions, teacher workload, teacher cooperation and student discipline were most important for teacher job satisfaction… teachers with more experience of professional development and more efficacious teachers tended to have higher levels of job satisfaction.”

Perhaps that is why despite all these points, 88 per cent of Australian teachers still believed that it was worth it. I guess it goes to show that if you love teaching, you love teaching.

With the rise of online courses, YouTube lectures and the leering threat of automation, teaching might feel like it’s under threat.

However nothing could be further from the truth. Human-centric roles that require working directly with an individual are often among the hardest things for an AI to handle – they aren’t human after all – and while some things can be handled online or with educational videos, the same could have been said about documentaries forty years ago.

A lot needs to be said for the value of having an educated professional guide you through your learning, and that above all else is what teachers provide.

Although some jobs in the future may be at risk – particularly those that can be handled by one person with the right tools – the vast majority of teaching jobs are stable, long-term commitments – and once in it’s an almost guaranteed long term gig.

Schools are often reluctant to lose their teachers – a good teacher once lost can be hard to replace – and the bonds they form with children year after year are the sort of bonds that can sometimes last lifetimes.

So in the end, if you’re considering a career in education, there are a lot of pros.

Reliability, security, satisfaction and even a guaranteed to increase salary are all substantial perks for teachers across the country, and a career in teaching can open up other pathways going forward. But the only real question that matters is this, do you love teaching?

If so, then you should be a teacher.

We look forward to having you.