After seven years in the classroom, Robyn Moore was in need of a change. Like many educators, she was unsure of how to make the change or what it would entail, especially as the daughter of a career-long teacher. But she was confident her next role would involve fewer pencils and backpacks.
While working as a full-time teacher, Robyn began exploring career options through skills classes. Between attending the lectures and working on her skills projects, she also started listening to the Teacher Career Coach Podcast, where she heard about the Invited MBA.
“There’s a stigma for teachers leaving the classroom that they don’t care about the kids anymore, or that they’re letting down their coworkers – and that’s hard to overcome. But when I heard how the Invited MBA is helping educators level up their business acumen to get jobs in the corporate world, I knew I wanted to try it for myself,” she said. “I could keep my job while completing the program, and that was a huge plus for me.”
Robyn admits being a teacher often means being “put into a box” in terms of skills. But she remained confident that transitioning out of the classroom just required a different vocabulary to translate the skills she already possessed into a business career.
After applying and being accepted into the Invited MBA program, Robyn was excited to experience the hands-on nature of the mini-MBA. She compares the experiential learning of the Invited MBA to techniques she used to teach her own students in the classroom.
“Teachers call experiential learning modeling. Hands-on learning, lessons, and follow-up work create a foundation and retention. That’s Education 101,” she said. “The Invited MBA was organized in good, bite-sized chunks that I could understand. The program wasn’t like a traditional MBA where you read a textbook and then you listen to the professor’s lecture. You actually were involved in the learning, just like I taught my students.”
The Invited MBA uses award-winning business simulations to teach real-life finance and business concepts, an experiential learning tool that Robyn really appreciated. In these simulations, students are given an executive-level role to play and a business to run. The decisions they make in the simulation mirror true-to-life problems and each decision has consequences that play out in real-time.
Robyn remembers playing the role of VP of Operations in Enterprise Challenge, learning how to support her team, assign tasks, and communicate effectively across a business. She realized after the simulation ended that teaching had already prepared her in many ways to be an effective people manager.
“Teachers have to be people-first, and that’s always resonated with me personally. We are also natural problem-solvers, and that translates really well into business,” she said. “Because the Invited MBA introduced me to a wide array of professional functions, I realized I wanted to pursue a career in business.”
After completing the Invited MBA program, Robyn took a contract role working in IT, something she had not considered since high school. But because of her mini-MBA experience, she was confident in managing projects, speaking the lingo, and finding solutions.
“I feel more confident now with business concepts. From balance sheets to stocks, I can skim documents and understand what they mean. The knowledge I gained from the Invited MBA helped me transition out of the classroom and set me up for success in any business role,” she said.
Since securing her contract role, Robyn has also taken coding classes to further her information technology and computer science skills. She has been pleasantly surprised how far ahead she is because of the transferable skills she learned in the Invited MBA.
“During my onboarding, I was with a lot of college graduates who have degrees in computer science and business,” she said. “But my supervisor told me that even without a computer science degree, I’m still appealing to employers because of my Invited MBA experiences and my soft skills like communication, time management, and organization that I can use in any career.”
Looking to the future, Robyn hopes to incorporate her love for people-management with her newfound skills in technology. She will always love teaching, and she’s optimistic she can lean on that skillset in a management position soon.
She believes teachers can adapt into other careers easily because they already work well on a team and communicate effectively with others. Interacting with her peers in the Invited MBA gave her the courage that “if they can do it, I can do it,” which eliminated a lot of the imposter syndrome some teachers feel after leaving the classroom.
“I would highly recommend this program to teachers and anyone who wants to learn business skills,” she said. “The Invited MBA helped me transition out of the classroom and into business.”
