Download the Technology Toolkit for Online Educators, Coaches, Consultants, and Experts working to create an online education-based business here:
https://bit.ly/TechToolkitforEDU

Join the Edupreneurs Online community to discuss your online teaching career/business
https://bit.ly/EdupreneursOnline

You may be interested in my course answering your most frequently asked questions about developing your own online course.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hello there, and welcome back to the cyber coffee talk Podcast. I am Heather Monthie, your host for this podcast, I am going to do something a little bit different this month with the podcast, I hope you enjoy it. What I’m going to do is I’m doing some short videos, live videos on Facebook and YouTube. And I will eventually be posting them on LinkedIn as well. But what I’m going to do is share with you some of my experiences, my advice and my thoughts on my experience as an information security it software engineering instructor, and the career path that I’ve had over the last 20 years or so. And the hopes that I can share with you, those of you who are interested in becoming an educator, so you work in the IT field, you work in information security, you’re a software developer, maybe you work in data science, or you know, some other highly technical field and you listen to this podcast, I want to share with you some thoughts I have and advice that you know, you can take it or leave it, it’s up to you on how to become an educator. And so there are several people who have, you know, I’ve done a lot of hiring over the years, I’ve seen things that have been done, right. And I’ve seen things that have been done wrong. And you know, I’ve given a lot of advice to people over the years as a teacher trainer. So you know, many of you know, I worked in education for a very long time, I was a teacher and then realized I had a larger impact as a teacher trainer. And so I wanted to answer some of the most frequently asked questions and share some stories, advice, tips, etc. So you’ll be seeing over the next month or so some shorter episodes, more frequent episodes, where I am taking the audio from some of the videos. And we’ll be sharing them here with you on the podcast. So I do talk about a technology teacher toolkit in this, in this video, the audio of this video. So I will put the link to that in the show notes. And that will be in the link, or I’m sorry, will be in the show notes for all of the episodes that come beyond this. So enjoy. Have a listen, talk to you soon.

Hello, everybody. Welcome. I am Heather Monthie. And I am going to start doing some quick short videos to share with you some of my experiences about becoming a it information security technology educator and my transition that I made from becoming a technologist to becoming a technology educator. Over the years I have worked in education at all different levels. And I get a lot of questions from people about how to make that transition. So I wanted to make this video series to to share with you some of my experiences and some of my thoughts and some things that you can do. If you are currently working in the IT technology field, you are interested in helping to give back and develop the next generation of technology professionals, whether you want to do it full time or part time or on your own, etc. So I wanted to just share with you today a little bit about my story, and how I got into becoming a technology educator. And so my first foray into teaching was back as a flight instructor. I always sort of knew as a child that I really enjoyed teaching, I liked working with people helping them achieve their goals. And so I always just kind of felt like I work in education in some capacity. And so I became a flight instructor. And I really found that I enjoyed teaching. That airline pilot career path didn’t work out for me, it just didn’t happen. That’s a whole nother story. But I had been working on a degree in Computer Science sort of as my backup plan in case something happened to me. And I couldn’t know I could no longer be an airline pilot. And so I ended up going that route. And I worked in the tech field for a little while. And I was really just like I really want to help train people help educate people and to develop their skill sets to help them achieve their goals, that kind of thing. So what I did is I ended up going back to school, and I got a master’s degree in education. Part of that master’s degree, I got licensed as a kindergarten one, sorry, first through eighth grade, general education teacher and then a first through ninth grade computer science teacher. I didn’t get the high school certification, because it meant that I had to do one more semester of student teaching and quite honestly, I needed to get a job. So I ended up getting licensed and got a job as a kindergarten through fifth grade computer teacher teaching, you know little kids how to press control, delete, how to log on the computers, that kind of thing. And then also some of the older kids taught them how to develop web pages, doing sort of Choose Your Own Adventure things type in, in PowerPoint, and that position was wonderful. I loved it. I cried the day that I found out that I wasn’t going to be able to do it any longer. The position was reduced and I needed to go a different So I went back to working in the tech field, and still just really had this nagging pulled towards working in education and helping people and helping them achieve their goals, that sort of thing. And so I ended up getting in touch with the community college that was across the street from where I worked at the time. And they needed people on their advisory board. So all colleges, universities, schools that have accreditation, they have an advisory board. And they are this is a group of people that work in the field. And they work very closely with the college, specifically on their particular programs, their particular offerings to make sure that as students are going through their programs, they’re coming out on the other end, with the skill sets that are needed to by the employers of the company, right. So I joined that advisory board. And I really found that I enjoyed working with adults and helping them to transform their lives and to start a new career upskill their current career and really make that advancement in the technology profession, whether it’s an IT computer programming, software development, software engineering, I’ve worked in information security as well. And you know, these are high paying careers, these are great jobs, there’s a huge demand for them. And so I really found that I enjoyed working with adults and helping them to progress down this career path. So I just started telling anybody and everybody who would listen that this is what I wanted to do. And what ended up happening was and somebody knew somebody, and you know, just by way of networking, I got in touch with somebody at another school, who they were looking for somebody to teach software engineering courses, I hadn’t had a computer science degree at a master’s degree in, in teaching and education. And so it really seemed like a natural fit. So I started teaching night classes. And these were in person classes, started teaching them at night. And I loved what I was doing. I was working very hard, I was working full time during the day I was still on call, I was still in a role where I was on call off hours, answering pages to fill jobs, that kind of thing. And then I was teaching at night, and I was teaching sometimes three and four nights a week. And sometimes Saturday mornings. And I loved it I absolutely loved I was doing but again, through networking, I was able to find a position as a department chair. So I moved into that position as department chair. And I worked in that position for several years. That position required me to do part time teaching and then part time administration for the program. So I worked on the it program information security program, software, engineering programs, and anything in sort of that technical realm. And again, from there, doing some more networking, I was able to get a position as a dean at a vocational school. This is where I started expanding out a little bit beyond technology, and then to the trades and started getting into you know, some of the some of the trades professions, some new typical trades professions like each back or heating, ventilation, air conditioning, pharmacy technician, some of the allied health programs, that kind of thing, but really still focused on it information, security, etc. And, you know, over over the years, I worked with a lot of adults helping them achieve their goals. But then as I got further into administration, I realized I could have much more of an impact by becoming a teacher trainer. So what happened was, is that rather than me, teaching the students directly, I was starting to work then with the teachers who are working with the students. So teaching technology professionals how to transition from becoming a transition from being a technologist to becoming a technology educator, and helping them understand adult learning how to run a classroom, all that kind of stuff, and even how to do all this stuff online. And especially with the pandemic, you know, online education has grown a ton and I mean, it was growing to begin with, but with