A career test for teachers who are done being told “try tutoring”
Feed a teaching history into most career tests and they hand education back to you. The data from 2,327 teachers says the real move is different: the teaching skill, priced outside the school building.
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Last updated August 2026 · data computed August 10, 2026
The short answer
A career test for teachers has to see past the job title to the skill: explaining, designing learning, running a room. In Make the Leap's data from 2,327 teachers (February - August 2026), the strongest next-chapter theme is training, facilitation, and speaking (32%) - the teaching skill employed outside schools - and teachers carry a double pain no other profession matches: 58% name burnout and 56% feel underpaid. A test that ignores either number isn't testing anything.
The transferable-skills blindness
Career tests are history-readers: they take what you've done and what you say you enjoy, and match forward. For a teacher that machinery has a predictable failure mode - a decade in classrooms plus “I love helping people learn” maps to teaching, tutoring, and curriculum work, every time. The instrument can't tell the difference between the institution you're leaving and the skillyou'd keep. So it returns the institution.
The skill is the asset. Corporate trainers, professional-development designers, facilitators, instructional designers, program managers - these buyers pay for exactly what teaching builds, without the contract calendar. It's the top theme our assessment surfaces for teachers - narrowly ahead of going independent (31%) - and the most distinctive one: no other profession's paths lead with it.
What 2,327 teachers' results actually show
The named themes in the paths our assessment generates from teachers' own answers, counted once per teacher:
| Path theme | Share of 2,327 teachers |
|---|---|
| Training, facilitation, and speaking | 32% |
| Starting an independent business | 31% |
| Mission-driven and nonprofit work | 25% |
| Program and operations roles | 24% |
| Writing and content work | 23% |
Excludes a general “other specialist paths” grouping (27%) - a catch-all of niche directions that doesn't form one coherent destination.
Read together: teachers don't want to stop teaching - they want to stop doing it inside a system that underpays the work. Which is the other number a test must respect: 45% of the teachers we assess earn under $60K, and 56% feel underpaid - the highest of any profession we track - while 58% name burnout. Two constraints, both binding.
What former teachers actually move into, the pay-cut question, and the pension math live in our career change guide for teachers; the burnout numbers across all professions are in the career burnout deep-dive.
Which test should a teacher actually take?
For a free interests baseline with no account: O*NET's Interest Profiler - solid, and it will tell you that you like teaching. For a validated personality read: Truity (our first-hand review) - useful self-knowledge, still blind to your calendar and your salary schedule. The gap both leave is situational: a test that hears “I'd keep the explaining, lose the room, and I can't take a pay cut” and builds directions from that sentence. Ours reads exactly those sentences - bias disclosed, it's ours, and here's how it compares to the other free options.
| Test | Useful for a teacher because | Blind to |
|---|---|---|
| O*NET Interest Profiler | Free, credible interests baseline in 15 minutes | The skill-vs-institution distinction - it maps history back to education |
| Truity | Validated self-knowledge (Big Five + Holland); $29 report | Salary schedules, pension timing, the contract calendar |
| Make the Leap (ours) | Reads “keep the explaining, lose the room, no pay cut” and builds directions from it - free in full | We build it - weigh the bias; not teacher-only |
Ten minutes. The skill, not the job title.
The free assessment reads your own words and returns three named directions with income ranges - checked against what you actually need to earn, not what districts decided you're worth.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best career test for teachers?
One that can see the skill underneath the job title. Free interest inventories (O*NET is the credible baseline) will map a teaching history to education roles - accurate about your interests, useless about your options. Personality instruments like Truity's add self-knowledge but still don't know that you need summers to stop mattering financially, or what your pension timing costs. The test a teacher actually needs reads your own account of what you do all day - explaining, designing learning, managing a room - and returns directions that buy that skill outside the school system. Ours is built for exactly that reading - we make it, so weigh the bias - and the complete result costs nothing.
Will a career test just point me back to education?
Most will, and the mechanism is worth seeing: matching engines work from your history and your stated interests, and a decade of teaching plus a love of explaining maps straight to... teaching, tutoring, curriculum. The data tells a different story about where teachers actually go: in our 2,327-teacher cohort, the strongest path theme is training, facilitation, and speaking (32%) - corporate learning, professional development, workshops - which is the teaching skill priced by employers who aren't school districts. A useful test has to know that distinction exists.
What should a career test ask a teacher that most never do?
Three things. First, the money question in both directions - 56% of teachers in our data feel underpaid, the highest of any profession we track, so a real test has to check paths against the income you need, not just the work you'd enjoy. Second, the constraint calendar - contract years, pension vesting, and the September question shape what 'this year' can even mean for a teacher, and no checkbox instrument asks. Third, which parts of teaching you'd keep: the explaining, the designing, or the room - because those point at genuinely different directions.
Can teachers take a real career test for free?
Yes - ours is free in full: three named directions, each with an income range, plus your Work DNA and the specific loop that's kept you stuck - generated from your own written answers rather than a checkbox profile. It's built for working adults rather than teachers specifically, but the things a teacher's situation requires - income reality, transferable-skill reading, constraint honesty - are exactly what it does. For a no-email-at-all baseline, O*NET's Interest Profiler remains the standard first step.
Written by Jon Miksis - entrepreneur, retreat facilitator, and founder of Make the Leap. Jon has facilitated 6 immersive retreat experiences, attended 18 retreats across four continents, and spent 5+ years researching why smart, capable people stay stuck. He's traveled to 73 countries and invested over $120,000 in personal development. Guides on this site are built from Make the Leap's assessment data and reviewed by Jon; the methodology and its limits are published here.