5 Ways a Teaching Stint Can Boost Your Career

Get a good education, and your career prospects are bound to improve. Earn a college degree in the United States, researchers have found, and your lifetime earnings will be $830,000 higher, on average, than what people with only a high school education can achieve. But if it's so great to receive an education, what happens to the instructors who deliver all this learning to their students?

Sour faces abound when talk turns to educators' lots. Think of the stereotype of the noble instructor who earns only tiny raises for teaching vital material to new faces every year, even though long-ago students gain fortunes as famous doctors, lawyers or corporate leaders. Or consider the mean-spirited saying: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

I'm not going to argue that a lifelong career in teaching is the best way to get rich. It turns out that the average tenured professor in the U.S. earns about $97,000 a year, which is a lot less than the pay packages enjoyed by C-suite executives at sizable companies. But there's something magical that can happen when ambitious, high-achieving people clear out enough time to teach even one or two courses in their lives. Such classroom visits not only represent a fine way to "give back" -- they also can deliver remarkable boosts to the moonlighting instructor's regular career.

Here are five ways that a brief teaching stint can pay off in a big way.

1. Teaching helps organize what you know. One of the biggest business bestsellers this season is "Zero to One," a fast-paced collection of strategic insights from Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor. How did the book take shape? It is, quite literally, an outgrowth of lecture notes from a class that Thiel taught at Stanford Business School in 2012. Thiel may not need the royalties, but -- as I allude to in this article -- his ability to codify and publicize his thinking about start-ups is helping him climb even higher in the ranks of the world's savviest investors.
2. Teaching lets you analyze what's puzzling. It's awkward, in a fast-paced corporate job, to draw attention to areas where you don't have all the answers. Yet in a classroom, it's much easier to explore. Turn students loose on the most puzzling issues in your industry. Critique their answers. Before long, you (and your class) could be synthesizing a new understanding. Even Steve Ballmer has become a regular guest lecturer at business-school classrooms, now that his days as Microsoft CEO are over. As I explain in this Forbes cover story, Ballmer will be digging deep into the mysteries of product launches, looking at why some of Microsoft's rollouts worked so well, while others didn't.
   
3. Teaching builds your network. Look at the example of Jack Ma, a one-time English teacher in China who now is world-famous as the CEO of China's biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba. As Ma explains in this Inc magazine interview, a five-year stint, long ago, as an English teacher opened the way for him to visit Seattle in 1995 as an interpreter. There, he put down the first markers toward an Internet career. Even if most of us will never leverage our networks to that degree, teaching in a campus setting is a great way of meeting new people that can help our careers.
   
4. Teaching builds your brand. What are you really good at? How many people know that? Stay inside your corporation, and your reputation may be totally dependent on how a handful of people regard your work. Gain some visibility as a teacher, and you're on your way to being a known "name" in your field. For a delightful case in point, consider this account of how Jim Fowler attracted more than 140,000 students worldwide to his online math classes and became known as "The King of Calculus."
   
5. Teaching keeps you fresh. Years ago, I spent an hour with Daniel Tosteson, who was dean of the Harvard Medical School at the time. He was in his late 60s at the time, but he talked about new areas of medical research with all the enthusiasm of a teenager. That was his hallmark: building an entire curriculum in which, as The New York Times put it, relearning and expanding knowledge were as fundamental as any collection of static facts. Come in contact with students, think afresh each year about how to explain your field to a newcomer, and it's much easier to retain that excitement for your entire career..

(Photo credit: Jeremy Wilburn via Flickr/Creative Commons)