What If You Want a New Challenge but Don’t Want a Promotion?

What if a promotion just doesn’t appeal but you still want to grow, learn, challenge yourself and be excited about your career?

We often assume progress means moving higher up the ladder, but what if progress could also mean staying on the same rung but putting another ladder beside the one you are already on.  An exciting and new ladder.

There can come a point in your teaching career when you realise you’re good at what you do, but you’re not sure you want to keep doing exactly the same thing for the next ten or twenty years. You know your subject. You’re confident in the classroom. You’re experienced, capable and trusted. But you’re ready for something new.

The obvious answer is often promotion. Take on more responsibility. Apply for the next post. Move up into leadership. But what if none of that appeals? It can leave you questioning yourself, particularly if you’ve always been ambitious. Perhaps you haven’t lost your ambition at all. Maybe you have changed your opinion on what ambition means to you.

Because being capable of taking on more responsibility doesn’t mean you should do it or even want it.

You might want to learn something completely new. Use the skills that you've learnt through teaching in a different way. Have more variety in your week. Build something of your own. Reduce your teaching hours and explore another type of work alongside the classroom.

Your next challenge doesn’t necessarily have to be above you. It could be alongside you.

That’s something I’ve discovered in my own career. Reducing my teaching hours gave me the space to build other parts of my working life alongside teaching. I’ve learnt new skills, trained in completely different areas, challenged my thinking in new ways and built a working week that never would have existed if I’d assumed progression could only mean moving upwards in education and staying on the one path.

And I still get to teach. But instead of it being my whole week, it only constitutes two days of my working week. So, if you’re feeling restless but the next promotion leaves you cold, instead of asking, “What should my next career move be?”, try asking instead, “What am I craving more of in my working life?”. Is it challenge, creativity, autonomy, variety, flexibility or is it a mix of all these things?

You might not need to leave teaching to find it. You may simply need to stop assuming that the only way forward is up.

If nobody expected you to climb the next rung of the ladder, what would you be curious to explore instead?