Education Jobs and Teacher Jobs

The field of education—including elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities—is a very exciting place to look for a job because of the tremendous number of jobs available. I’m excited to show you how to approach this sector. I think it will open up some doors in terms of how you think about looking for a job.

Jobs in education tend to be scattered across an incredible number of sources. Many of these sources are university and school system websites. Because of this, it’s much easier to track down and apply for jobs at these institutions. You also have a better chance of actually getting these positions compared to those that are more widely advertised.

In order to explore this thoroughly, let’s start broad with the federal government and work our way down to state governments, universities, and finally, local school systems. Education jobs encompass not just teaching positions, but also those inside educational institutions. I’ll cover each below.

Education Jobs with the Federal and State Government

The US Department of Education has its own website, which lists numerous jobs. It’s basically like a regular job search engine. On this site, you’ll see vacancies in almost every field, including finance jobs, attorney jobs, and many others. This is the site:

http://jobsearch.edhires.ed.gov/

This particular site isn’t overflowing with opportunities, but it’s always good to check just for the sake of being thorough.

From the federal government, we move to the state government. Here is a list of the state departments of education, which all have several jobs available at any one time.

List of State Departments of Education

List of Territory Departments of Education

Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities are where the search starts to get exciting. To review, the strategy we’re following here is simply to go to the website and look at the jobs available.

Identify all of the colleges and universities in the area of the country in which you want to work. The best way of doing this is to use the following Wikipedia list. Wikipedia has the best lists so let’s review this one here quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_and_colleges_by_country

If you go to this link, you’ll see they have a list of universities and colleges by country. If you have some special sort of skill, you can apply to places in other countries if you teach something very specific and have a shot of getting a job there. Teachers job opportunities are everywhere.

For example, I lived in Bangkok, Thailand, when I was a teenager. I went to high school there for a year and there were tons of American teachers there. You can go to work in international schools and could be the “Teacher Jon” (or Jane) that the school needs. If you’re interested in teacher jobs, there are numerous places you can teach all over the world. Teacher job vacancies have no geographic boundaries.

Let’s look at California. You have a huge list of all of the different colleges. You can see also the California Community College Systems, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Basically, you’ve got this list of private colleges and they are all different places you could work organized by country. They have rankings and subjects of study. I really like Wikipedia. They can show you all the different law schools if you’re an attorney, chiropractic schools if you’re a chiropractor, and so on. It’s amazing what kind of resources you can find here.

After browsing through these lists, find the colleges and universities you’re interested in then go to their websites. Just so you can get an understanding of how it works, this is UCLA. Assume for a moment you’re interested in working there. You’d first go to the UCLA website. You can see they have different schools there.

The UCLA website, for example, has a tab called “employment.”

In addition to campus jobs, you can find more UCLA employment opportunities at the hospital, the medical school, for recruitment, for fund-raising, and more. It’s just awesome how many jobs you can find when you start looking at what each school offers.

It’s important to keep in mind that a lot of these jobs won’t be advertised on the school’s website. You have to dig in and look at all of these as closely as you can. To do this, go to Wikipedia.

Another thing I recommend is performing Google searches for colleges or universities in the county where you live. For example, let’s do a quick search. Type in “Los Angeles County universities” or “Colleges and universities in Los Angeles County.” Look at this. It’s absolutely insane:

There are other lists you can use to find these schools. Most states have lists on their Department of Education websites. For example, look at Arizona’ site: AZED.gov.

I also recommend looking into unaccredited schools. It’s fascinating. This is a good list of unaccredited institutions of higher learning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unaccredited_institutions_of_higher_education

It’s still under construction, but I would keep checking back to see updates. It will obviously continue to improve over time.

Unaccredited schools could become accredited at any time, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Then, of course, there are always the U.S. News and World Report rankings located at: http://www.usnews.com/rankings.

There are colleges and universities all over. There may even be some in your own town that you don’t know about. What’s funny, especially in California where I’m located is there are a lot of unaccredited schools.

I remember several years ago, probably closer to ten years ago, I was sitting in an office building and talking to someone on the phone. He said to me that he was a student in this particular law school. I asked what law school and he said the name. I literally had never heard of it. It was in an office building that was a stone’s throw from where I was working. I had never heard of the law school. Be on the lookout for both unaccredited and accredited schools and know that there are schools all over that you may not know about.

In addition to looking for colleges and universities, you should look for trade schools. They have jobs for accountants, attorneys, architects, and pretty much any profession you can think of. To the extent you want to be very proactive in your job search, you need to look at pretty much every list of trade schools you possibly can. Chances are, several trade schools are located nearby.

This is a vocational school database: http://www.usnews.com/rankings.

A lot of this database is online and I haven’t found a good list that is public. I want to warn you that these tend to be lead generation sites. You can see there are places here that are advertised.

The for-profit education system is huge. As a matter of fact, the founder of the University of Phoenix is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the United States. I just want you to understand that when you’re looking at these lists, you need to be careful. None of these lists are complete. In some cases, people have to pay to be on these lists.

Trade schools may or may not advertise in different places online, but you should use these lists to the fullest extent possible. I’m cognizant of the fact that if you’re looking for a job, simply as a teacher, professor, or something, that you’re going to go to this site and look for other colleges and universities. Use these lists and even look at trade schools. There is a lot of available work depending on the geographic areas you choose.

Jobs in K–12

Finally, let’s consider lower level education. Now, many people look at private schools to find K–12 jobs. Again, there are lots of good lists for that. I am going to give you some links for private schools. Let’s look at a couple of them quickly.

Check out this list for accredited schools from all over the country: http://www.privateschoolreview.com/. This is a good searchable list.

Check out this list of schools as well: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/schools/Default.aspx.

Wikipedia is a good source for lists of K-12 schools. Check out its listings for California, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high_schools_in_California. This list is broken down by all of the counties in California. Wikipedia does this for every state.

Remember, each of these schools, with the exception of some of the smaller ones, are going to have openings on an ongoing basis. The point is, to find a job, you have look at each of the schools in your region, and these links are awesome for doing that quickly.

If you want to save yourself time and look through a comprehensive database of education jobs for free, check out Granted.com. Created by our company after more than a year’s work, Granted is an excellent resource in your education job search, no matter what type of education job you’re looking for.

Conclusions

There are a myriad of jobs in the education sector that you can locate if you know where and how to look.