Sarah's story starts differently than most. She taught high school math for ten years and enjoyed it. Good colleagues, a district she liked, a subject she cared about. Nobody was crying under a desk.
Then COVID happened. In her words: "Covid burnt me out." When her school went back to in-person instruction, she had what she calls a minor freak out, and underneath it was a clear realization: this wasn't sustainable for her anymore, even in a school she loved.
That matters, because a lot of teachers wait for their situation to get unbearable before they let themselves consider leaving. Sarah's permission slip wasn't misery. It was the honest recognition that the career no longer fit the life she wanted.
Sarah attended one of my free workshops and joined the January 2022 cohort of the Applied Instructional Design Academy (AIDA). She was 28 weeks pregnant.
Run that through the "I don't have time" filter most people use. Full-time teaching job. Third trimester. A nursery to set up. If timing were the thing that decides who makes this transition, Sarah doesn't make it.
Instead she flipped the math: the baby wasn't a reason to wait, the baby was the deadline. She worked through the program with a due date circled on the calendar, and she finished her coursework in the first week of April. Her daughter arrived on April 17th.
On April 20th, three days after giving birth, Sarah had her first interview, with a software company that needed help badly.
Here's the detail I want you to sit with: they hired her in May knowing she'd just had a baby, and she kept her full 12-week maternity leave even though the company was urgently short-staffed. They wanted her enough to wait for her.
That's what a portfolio does. It didn't matter that she was brand new to the field or that she couldn't start tomorrow. The work spoke first, and the company planned around her life instead of asking her to plan around theirs. When's the last time teaching offered you that deal?
Sarah now runs her company's training system and builds instructional videos that teach clients how to use the software. Real deliverables, real audience, and a completely different relationship with work.
Ten years of Sunday-night dread, gone. A new baby at home, and a job that leaves her the energy to enjoy her. Her verdict on the whole thing is five words long: "It was THE best decision."