One of fifteen jobs former educators actually hold
You build the learning content inside the product.
Writing and sequencing lessons, assessments, and teacher-facing materials against standards. Review cycles with subject matter experts and editors. If the company sells curriculum, you are making the thing the company sells, which is a different feeling than supporting it.
You are far from the student. You will never see whether the lesson worked. Feedback arrives as sales data and occasional complaints, not as a kid getting it. For some people that distance is exactly the relief they wanted and for others it is the thing that eventually drives them back.
Salary. Contract and freelance work is common in this field.
Pick your starting point.
This is the most direct translation on the list. Standards alignment, scaffolding, assessment design, differentiation: it is the same craft with a production calendar attached.
Reachable straight from teaching, especially with a strong portfolio. Publishers and curriculum companies hire from the classroom regularly.
Weaker for you than for a teacher still writing lessons daily. What does carry is the oversight side: running a curriculum adoption committee, auditing pacing guides against standards, and reviewing other people's units for alignment. If you were a department chair or coach, the writing craft is probably still current.
Portfolio decides this one, not title. Publishers want to see lessons and assessments you personally wrote recently, and an assistant principal resume of observations and discipline data will not show that. Coaches and department chairs can apply directly. Everyone else should rebuild a writing sample set first, or come in through professional development.
Standards alignment, scope and sequence, and curriculum adoption review all transfer. You have evaluated instructional materials against a rubric, written the alignment documentation that a board sees, and specified what teacher-facing materials a program must include. You know the difference between a lesson that looks good in a demo and one a substitute can run.
Directors of curriculum land here, but the hiring test is a portfolio of content you personally wrote, not adoptions you supervised. Build sample lessons, an assessment set, and a facilitator guide. Selecting materials is not the same skill as authoring them.
Of 7 instructional design postings at education companies, read in September 2026, 5 named classroom teaching or an equivalent background.
The same job posts under other names. Search these too:
None of the 7 K-12 curriculum postings named an authoring tool like Articulate Storyline or a specific LMS. If you search by tool, you will land in corporate training jobs instead. At curriculum companies, standards frameworks are the vocabulary that counts.
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