From Classroom to Code: My Unexpected Journey
The fluorescent lights flickered overhead as I packed up my classroom for the last time. Five years of lesson plans, student artwork, and carefully curated reading corners—all boxed away as I closed one chapter and nervously opened another.
When COVID hit, I wasn't just teaching multiplication tables and reading comprehension anymore. Suddenly, I was a tech support specialist, online curriculum designer, and virtual classroom manager all at once. Between troubleshooting Zoom for seven-year-olds and creating digital resources parents could actually use at home, I discovered something unexpected: I loved the technical challenges as much as the teaching.
Those pandemic classroom pivots weren't just survival mode—they revealed something important. While watching learning gaps widen before my eyes, I saw how the right technology could be a bridge rather than a barrier. The students who thrived often had access to innovative learning tools that engaged them despite the distance. Those without fell further behind.
That realization hit me hard: What if I could build those bridges?
The transition from elementary educator to full-stack web developer wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was born from countless late nights helping parents navigate learning platforms, watching students light up when technology made concepts click, and feeling the frustration when poorly designed educational software created more problems than solutions.
Nothing will ever replace the magic of face-to-face learning and the relationships built in a classroom. But technology, when thoughtfully created by people who understand educational needs, can help close critical gaps.
So here I am—trading morning assemblies for morning standups, lesson plans for wireframes, and parent conferences for client meetings. My teacher planner has been replaced with project management software, but my purpose remains the same: to make learning more accessible, engaging, and equitable.
This blog will document my journey—raw and unfiltered—as I navigate this career pivot. From classroom management to state management in React, from teaching division to dividing components, I'm bringing my educator's heart to a developer's world.
I hope you'll join me on this adventure. The bell has rung, and class is now in session.
The Teacher Advantage: What Educators Bring to Tech Teams
It was 7:30 pm on conference night when I realized I hadn't eaten since my granola bar at 10 am. My throat was scratchy from hours of talking, my feet ached in their "professional" shoes, and I still had three more parent meetings to go. This wasn't unusual—this was teaching.
This is why companies should be fighting to hire educators for their teams.
When a former colleague (now a UX designer) shared my resume with her tech company, the hiring manager reportedly said, "Interesting background, but does she have any relevant experience?" I nearly choked on my coffee. Five years of teaching felt suddenly invisible on my carefully crafted resume. Let me make the invisible visible:
We're MacGyvers of Resource Management
One day, our school lost power during record-breaking cold temperatures. While waiting for updates, I taught a full math lesson on fractions to 26 eight-year-olds using nothing but construction paper, scissors, and flashlights. We made it into a "math adventure" that students still talked about months later.
When the quarterly budget for classroom supplies ran out three weeks early, I didn't miss a beat. I redesigned our science experiment using materials from my recycling bin at home.
Imagine what teachers could do with actual resources and support.
We're Endurance Athletes of the Professional World
Teachers don't have the luxury of saying "I'll get back to you tomorrow" when facing a challenge. When a student is struggling, a lesson isn't working, or technology fails mid-presentation, we pivot immediately while maintaining composure.
My record: teaching a full day with a 103-degree fever (while losing my voice) because no substitute was available, then designing differentiated lesson plans for the next day before finally going home.
If I could design effective learning experiences while battling the flu and managing a classroom crisis, imagine what I could build for your company with a good night's sleep and reasonable deadlines.
We're Communication Ninjas
Try explaining complex concepts to 28 individuals with different learning styles, attention spans, and background knowledge—simultaneously. Then do it again three times a day.
I once had to write an email to parents explaining why their child had bitten three classmates without blaming anyone, violating privacy, creating panic, or using any triggering language—all while offering actionable solutions. That email should be framed as a masterclass in diplomatic communication.
We're Data Analysts by Necessity
Teachers don't just collect data—we live and breathe it while maintaining human connection. I tracked 26 students across 37 different assessment metrics, identified performance patterns, designed personalized intervention strategies, and documented outcomes—all while making each child feel individually valued and supported.
The Bottom Line
When you hire a teacher, you're not getting someone who needs to learn professional skills. You're getting someone who has mastered them under the most challenging circumstances imaginable.
We don't crack under pressure—we've managed classrooms of 26 energetic kids right before a holiday break.
We don't fear deadlines—we've prepared students for standardized tests with constantly changing requirements.
We don't need micromanagement—we've designed and executed curriculum with minimal oversight for years.
The next time you see "Teacher" on a resume, don't see a career changer starting from scratch. See someone who has been training for your fast-paced, high-pressure environment their entire career—just in a different arena.
Your company doesn't need to take a chance on teachers. Teachers are taking a chance on your company.
The Unfiltered Reality: My Tech Transition Truth
Today marks six months since I turned in my classroom keys. Six months since I traded lesson plans for coding challenges. Six months and $20,000 later, I'm still refreshing my inbox, hoping for something other than another polite rejection.
"While your background is impressive, we're looking for candidates with corporate experience."
If I had a dollar for every time I've read some version of that sentence, I could recoup my bootcamp tuition.
The irony isn't lost on me. I left teaching partly because I was drowning—mentally, emotionally, physically. Postpartum hormones collided with a new administration, dwindling support staff, and the crushing weight of responsibility for tiny humans' futures. I wasn't showing up as my best self for my students or my newborn. Something had to give.
I chose technology because I believed in its power to transform education. I still do. But I didn't anticipate the catch-22 of needing experience to get experience.
Here's the strangest part: despite the financial strain and professional uncertainty, I'm mentally healthier than I've been in years. I can drink water without strategically timing bathroom breaks between classes. I can take my temperature when I feel feverish without finding coverage for 26 children first. I can hold my baby without mentally drafting emails about curriculum standards.
The rejection letters sting, absolutely. But they sting in a different way than feeling like I was failing children despite giving everything I had.
What frustrates me most is knowing what hiring managers aren't seeing when they scan my resume:
I'm not just learning to code—I'm applying the same meticulous attention to detail that helped me track 26 different reading levels simultaneously.
I'm not just building projects—I'm applying the same creative problem-solving that helped me teach division with nothing but paper clips when our math manipulatives went missing.
I'm not just another bootcamp graduate—I'm someone who maintained professionalism while getting vomited on multiple times in a single flu season.
My bootcamp experience wasn't the supportive environment I expected. Just weeks after enrolling, the company was acquired. Curriculum changed overnight. Instructors seemed as lost as students. Staff turnover meant constantly rebuilding relationships with career coaches who barely knew my name.
Yet I adapted—just like I did when curriculum standards changed mid-year, when classroom budgets were cut, when support staff positions were eliminated.
I went into this transition eyes wide open about the challenges, but I never expected my greatest obstacle would be convincing employers that five years of split-second decision making, crisis management, and creative problem-solving in the classroom was "relevant experience."
I'm not giving up. But today, I'm letting myself acknowledge how hard this is. Tomorrow, I'll put my teacher resilience back on and try again.
New Horizons: Finding Hope After the Hard Reset
Sometimes the universe has a way of forcing your hand when you're too stubborn to let go. After two years away from the classroom and countless rejections in the Des Moines tech scene, we finally decided it was time for a change and moved to Tampa, Florida. It felt like a cosmic intervention—a chance to hit the reset button on a transition that had become increasingly demoralizing.
Packing up our life with a toddler in tow wasn't easy. Neither was admitting that my first attempt at breaking into tech hadn't gone as planned. But as we drove across state lines, watching the landscape change from Iowa cornfields to Florida palms, I felt something I hadn't experienced in months: possibility.
During those two years in Des Moines, I'd been managing our Airbnb property—a role that taught me about business operations, customer service, and financial planning, yet somehow didn't qualify as "relevant experience" in tech recruiters' eyes. The Des Moines tech market is tight-knit and limited. Breaking in without connections proved nearly impossible, especially as companies implemented hiring freezes for entry-level positions. My LinkedIn network—nearly nonexistent after years in education where professional connections happen in teachers' lounges, not online platforms—wasn't opening any doors.
We chose Florida not just for my partner's career opportunity, but for a completely fresh start—new experiences, new perspectives, and a chance to reinvent ourselves. In Tampa, the tech ecosystem is more diverse and expansive. More importantly, I've had time to reflect on what wasn't working in my approach.
My revelation came while helping my toddler build a tower. When it kept toppling, we didn't keep trying the same unstable foundation—we reassessed and rebuilt from the ground up.
That's exactly what I needed to do with my tech journey.
While I'm proud of completing my web development bootcamp despite its challenges (corporate acquisition mid-program, constant curriculum changes, revolving door of instructors), I've realized that data analytics aligns more naturally with my existing strengths. The pattern recognition, critical thinking, and communication skills I honed as a teacher transfer perfectly to translating data into actionable insights. Even managing our Airbnb taught me to analyze occupancy trends, pricing strategies, and guest feedback—all relevant data points in my new direction.
I've enrolled in a data analytics bootcamp that offers more structured career support and employer connections. This time, I'm also building my professional network before I need it, connecting with Tampa tech professionals and joining local data communities.
The journey hasn't been linear, and it's been humbling to take what feels like a step backward to ultimately move forward. But education taught me that learning is rarely a straight line—it's a series of attempts, reflections, and adjustments.
Florida's job market shows promising opportunities for data roles at all levels. Each morning, my job alerts show openings that actually include "entry-level" without requiring three years of experience—a refreshing change from what I was seeing before.
I'm approaching this reset with hard-earned wisdom: technical skills matter, but in this transition, translating my varied experiences into language that resonates with hiring managers may matter more. I'm no longer compartmentalizing my background—I'm connecting how analyzing student performance data to identify learning gaps and managing property metrics both prepared me for business analytics roles.
The path from classroom to corporate is rarely straightforward. Mine has included expensive detours, two years of career limbo, cross-country moves, and moments of profound doubt. But standing here on this new shore, watching the Gulf Coast waves erase and redraw the shoreline again and again, I'm reminded that sometimes you need to be washed clean before you can begin again.
The teacher in me knows that the most important lessons often come from our greatest struggles. The property manager in me understands the value of location and timing. The data analyst in me sees the pattern shifting. The human in me is finally ready to embrace this next chapter—not as Plan B, but as the right path revealed in its own time.
Data, data, data...
The Long Road to Data Engineering:
Throughout my five years in the classroom, I became obsessed with finding stories hidden in student data. I tracked reading levels, math fluency, writing scores, even social-emotional check-ins. I'd spend prep periods building spreadsheets to see patterns I'd been missing.
My colleagues started asking for help: "Kirby, where are you getting this data? Something's not adding up." That's when it hit me: what if I could do this for ALL teachers, not just the ones down the hall?
When I left the classroom in 2023, I had a clear vision: build technology that helps teachers use data as a roadmap to student success, not just a compliance burden.
I started with full-stack development, but soon realized the real magic happens in the data layer. How do you clean messy student information systems? How do you create dashboards that actually help teachers make decisions? How do you build pipelines that turn raw assessment data into actionable insights?
I needed to become a data engineer.
Here's the part that doesn't make it into neat career transition stories: my husband and I moved from Iowa to Tampa, I became a stay-at-home mom, and my "6-week intensive program" turned into an 6-month journey of learning between nap times (if and when those happened) and studying before morning wake up.
There were days I wanted to quit. But every time, I'd remember that Tuesday afternoon in my classroom—the look on my students' faces when they finally understood vowel teams, how powerful it felt to use data to change lives.
The Finish Line (That's Really a Starting Line):
I officially have my Data Engineering certification through DataExpert.io Academy. My son starts daycare in August, and I'm officially on the job hunt.
Why EdTech? Why Now? Teachers are drowning in data they don't know how to use. They're spending precious time manually entering information into systems that don't talk to each other. They're making decisions based on gut feelings instead of insights because the data is too messy, too slow, or too complicated to access.
I've been that teacher. I've felt that frustration. And now I have the technical skills to do something about it.
To the Recruiters Reading This:
If you're looking for a data engineer who understands the end user, I'm your person. I don't just know how to build ETL pipelines—I know what it feels like to desperately need clean, accessible data at 7 AM before your first class starts.
I've been the bridge between the technical side and the human side, and I want to keep being that bridge. My journey hasn't been linear or easy, but it's been authentic, driven by a real problem I lived every day for five years.
Are you building solutions that make educators' lives better? Let's talk.
