Why I left teaching to start a business?

It’s been nearly three years since I left my career as Head of Department in a school to embark on a journey as start-up founder at Uptree. I trained with Teach First and had 6 years of teaching under my belt. Lots of people have since asked me why I left a solid career in teaching to start my company, so I thought I’d share some of the reasons with you in this post.

When client partners or potential partners ask me this question now, I normally revert to this response:

As a teacher I saw careers advice as a huge problem and felt that young people weren’t getting the access to careers education and work experience that they needed. I wanted to do something to support young people in careers.

Although this is definitely true, the initial reasons were more personal and around my feelings as a teacher. I knew I wanted to have a social impact in education, but I wasn’t sure what that looked like quite yet. I’ll write more about the problem we are working on in a different post. Here are my more personal reasons for leaving teaching to start a business:

As a teacher my impact often felt small in the day to day grind of back to back geography lessons and rushing through the curriculum in limited time. It made it hard to build relationships with the 100s of students, truly understand more about their needs, and support them to have a positive influence on their lives.

I guess I didn’t care that much about teaching geography, however working with young people and being able to offer them advice and support was something I did care about- a lot. When I worked as a youth worker I experienced talking to young people on a more one to one basis. I discovered more about their hopes and dreams. I found that my believing in them made a huge difference. As a teacher I didn’t have enough time to focus on that kind of support that I really cared about.

Teachers are ultimately under so much time pressure to deliver in a short space of time that it made me into a person that I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be positive, start the lesson with a positive, make sure I was speaking to students positively. Especially as some of them had so much negativity in their own lives. After a while you forget this and it’s easier to be angry at things not working out in your lessons and blaming the students for being late, or not having a pen when there were many different factors at play. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.

I love problem solving- being able to work on a product or service that helps to solve a bigger issue in something I cared about was really appealing to me. It was clear that the system is failing some young people in terms of careers, and I felt that my experience working in a school would add value in creating a better solution.

Uptree is a platform for companies and young people. We help young people connect with professionals and opportunities before they leave school. Why? Because it’s proven that young people are 5 times more employable if they have just 4 or more employer interactions before leaving school. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, so we are working to make access to careers education and professional connections more fair. At the same time we help companies raise awareness of their brand, make their pathways more accessible to diverse talent and ultimately hire better.

Learn more about Uptree on their blog , website or by emailing Tamsin directly via tamsin@uptree.co

Originally published at medium.com.