Graduates of various teaching programs and those who would like to redirect their career path must consider different aspects of choosing from the options available within the educational services. As an educator, you can most often find a job in a school or in a publishing company. Consider the pluses and minuses of each of them before you make your choice.

To begin with, the choice of your career should depend on what you like and what you feel strong at as that translates best onto your professional satisfaction. Of course the earnings are also an issue. However, do not let money govern your choices too much; account for all the aspects of a particular profession, e.g. the profile of the people you work with, stressful factors, the level of responsibility, prestige and the working environment, among others.

Teaching is the primary and most frequently chosen option by those with an education degree. However, working as a teacher in any of a number of types of schools requires different kinds of skills and involves different risks and advantages. Some common denominators for all the teaching environments listed below are the possibility to directly realise one's mission as a teacher and an educator, or the benefit of having guaranteed holidays. As for the common downsides experienced by teachers, the relatively low pays (although not necessarily) and the specificity of working with students are the most dominant ones. Apart from these similarities, though, each of the teaching positions is specific in and of itself.

Although working as a kindergarten or a primary school teacher is rightly perceived as a physically and psychologically demanding job, it also has many merits. First of all, working with children lets you shape their most important knowledge, skills, attitudes and values which, instilled in them at this age, may influence them positively for a lifetime. A huge responsibility as this is, it may also be a source of great satisfaction and fulfillment. Nevertheless, to work like this you need to genuinely like children and be able to manage their large groups in terms of discipline and work organisation. Another disadvantage is the risk of health issues related to the teacher's larynx due to the high level of noise and the necessity to get through it. Apart from that, while choosing this career path you should factor in the pressure that often arises from the children's parents and the fact that your specialist knowledge fossilises rather than expands, although you do have a lot of professional development opportunities within the sphere of teaching as such.

In overviewing the advantages and disadvantages of working with teenagers, the specifity of their age is an essential factor. Being in one's teens in an extremely formative period in students' lives, therefore, as a teacher you have a fascinating opportunity to influence the youth's development and direct them towards constructive goals. On the other hand, working with teenagers, just like with children, involves a lot of responsibility and one must be prepared for the difficulty of keeping the dicipline in the classes. Students at this age also tend to have high expectations and little tolerance for the teacher's mistakes and wrong judgements and are very critical of him or her as a person. Therefore, if you are planning this career, you have to make sure that you will be able to maintain a good relationship with your students based on your authority and their trust.

A separate category, although one overlapping with most of the others, is a teaching career at a private school. Although teaching in such a place may involve more modern equipment and methods, there are some disadvantages to this form of teaching as well. For instance, the commercial aspect of teaching in a private school may be considered a serious drawback if the school managers tend to view their employees as walking advertisements of their schools. In such case, the managers may blame the teachers any time a student decides to resign from the course or has not achieved expected results due to his or her laziness. Also, in schools where the students (or their parents) pay for their education, the pressure from the parents and the manager is usually higher than elsewhere.

Teaching at a university or a higher education institution is, first and foremost, considered a very prestigious position but also one difficult to obtain. Apart from the prestige, academic teachers enjoy their opportunity to develop constantly within the area of their interests. Upgrading one's knowledge is, however, not only an opportunity but also a responsibility, one demanding constant evidence in the form of frequent academic publications and coferences. If that condition is not met, an employee will not maintain his or her job for long. As both teachers and researchers, academic staff must be prepared for working at home a lot. Those who can manage these two functions, however, might appreciate the fact that very often university teachers can set their own guidelines and demands and work quite independently with more mature and respectful students.

Working as a private tutor is a good option for those who value independence. One of the advantages of choosing this career path is that you can create your own shedule and, ideally, if you have enough clients, work only with those students you want to teach. Since you are self-employed and do not have to manage the whole class, the job involves much less stress and health risk. Also, due to the possiblity to devote more time per student, his or her results are likely to be higher than those of students in a large group which can positively affect your professional satisfaction. Finally, private classes are usually better paid and, if need be, you can conduct them remotely via online conferences. On the flip side, as a self-employed private tutor, you need to manage your own marketing campaign and your income may change dependingly on how many students resign from your classes each month.

An alternative to teaching and/or being a researcher is finding a job as an editor of teaching materials. Such work takes place usually in an office of a publishing house or at schools wanting to implement digital teaching technologies such as e-learning platforms. As teaching materials include coursebooks, visual and audio aids, and digital courses, your tasks may be varied and involve many different skills. For this reason, designing teaching materials may be seen as a highly creative and interesting job. On the other hand, those with an aversion to technology may find this work unsatisfying, since high computing skills are a must with the teaching aids' becoming more and more digitalised. Contrary to teaching, the social aspect of this work is taken over by working with a computer which means a higher risk of eye and back diseases and less direct feedback from the learners. However, it also tends to be a less stressful job and a relatively well-paid one.

Setting up one's own school requires knowledge and skills in the area of business and marketing as well as a substantial sum of money for a start. Also, being a director of such an enterprise, one usually has to resign from teaching since a manager's tasks may be very time-consuming. At some point you may actually need to employ some administrative personnel to take care of accountancy or advertising. As with every business, running one's own school can be a very stressful job and it may take time until the efforts put in it start bringing real profits. The advantages of this career path include, for instance, the freedom to choose one's own staff and teaching methods.

All in all, the career paths available within education are plenty and quite varied. Those who decide to seek for professional satisfaction as teachers can choose from a variety of types of schools and forms of teaching depending on their particular strong and weak points. While assessing these, one should take into account the specificity of working with students at a particular age or the pressure from the part of the directors or the students' parents. Education experts with an entrepreneurial zeal may succeed in running their own school although this option usually comes down to managing the work of others rather than teaching on one's own. Alternatively, the editing of teaching materials may be a good choice for those who prefer office work to orchestrating classes. Finally, apart from basing one's decision on the qualifications and skills required at a particular job, one should also factor in the different stress levels and health risks involved.