Shifting Gears — From Product Management to Teaching

The year 2018 was a time of career changes for me. My last corporate assignment, as a Product Line Manager for the Converged Communications Division of Dialogic ended in early January.  The division was divested to another company, Sangoma, and all of the roughly eight product lines I managed were part of the deal, but my time was up.

I’d had a productive three year run in my return to the company, so I decided this presented an opportunity for me to re-assess how I wanted to spend my time. I considered various possibilities, but one of the most attractive directions was to explore the potential to get involved in university teaching. Teaching or training has often been part of my work in product management and consulting, but I liked the idea of being on a college campus and bringing my business experience into the classroom. Several of my business colleagues had previously made the move from business into academia, so I began  reaching out to them as part of my networking process.

It turns out that having a master’s degree is one of the requirements to be considered for some adjunct teaching roles, so my Master of Engineering in Management Engineering from Rensselaer (RPI) covered that prerequisite. The Boston area has a rich selection of diverse universities and Northeastern University in particular has a strong business program. But it quickly became clear through my networking meetings that if I wanted to seriously pursue a teaching role, I needed to target a particular semester and make sure I’d be available to teach for several months as a time.  My early contacts were promising, so I decided to go for it.

I continued job hunting, but also looked hard for potential consulting assignments that would give me more time flexibility in the event a teaching assignment opened up. I was open to a lot of options and got a tentative offer from Northeastern to teach an Introduction to Business course around March. The details firmed up a couple of months later.

In parallel, I started doing some consulting, so I was busy with that work and had a teaching assignment which would start just after Labor Day. In preparation, I continued my networking, but now with a specific focus. I had several informal discussions with colleagues who had moved into academia and they were virtually all willing to share takeaways from their experiences in the classroom. This was all helpful and I felt good about the upcoming change.  One big change from my other teaching work was the extent to which the current teaching tools are online and highly integrated.  I took a course in Blackboard, which is the teaching platform used at Northeastern, but had to come up to speed very fast in its practical use for this particular class. My years of IT experience helped, but there were many fine details which weren’t always obvious.

Intro to Business at Northeastern is somewhat unusual in various respects. I became part of a faculty teaching team which teaches the class to several hundred incoming freshmen at the D’Amore McKim School of Business.  A standard syllabus had been prepared, but it was up to each individual teacher to deliver the material in an effective manner. We met as a team before the semester began and typically met every two weeks after that. Our class sizes were relatively small — my fall semester sections had fewer than 15 students.

Classes began on the Wednesday after Labor Day.  From this point forward, I taught the students three days a week in the classroom, but quickly found I needed to spend much more time outside of the classroom to prepare. As teachers, our goal was to provide students with a foundation in the basic elements of business — addressing topics such as entrepreneurship, marketing and accounting / finance — while simultaneously helping them form teams which would apply the concepts in a variety of assignments. The early workload was substantial, but the students quickly had chances to develop new skills in areas such as conducting research surveys and learning about finance using Bloomberg terminals. As teachers, a key challenge was to engage with the students on various aspects of business through readings of a textbook, numerous articles and other tools such as videos, and encourage the students to use critical thinking in applying the material. The teaching was less about lecture than alternative means; as a professor, I facilitated in-class discussions and encouraged the teams to work together to  reach conclusions.

Here are a few takeaways from my first semester on campus:

  1. Teaching a class for the first time is a lot of work. I’d seen this before in my earlier teaching experiences, but it was particularly true for this class. Most of the effort was outside the classroom and included preparation, review and grading of assignments and meeting with students. It felt like I learned a lot over the course of the semester and this will help me to be more efficient and effective in teaching future classes.
  2. I found this particular class drew upon a wide range of my business experiences and skills.  For example, the review of supply chain and operations tied well into my original degree studies in Management Engineering at RPI and experiences from the three years when I managed purchasing and materials management for Burroughs and Fujitsu.
  3. Managing the class relied heavily upon online technology, notably on the learning automation tool known as Blackboard. Blackboard is a bit quirky, so the integration between 3rd party software and Blackboard is brittle and held a few surprises. My many years of IT experience helped here.
  4. In business, the focus is on meeting customer needs. When teaching university classes, meeting the needs of students is the central focus. One key goal was to bring my business experiences to the classroom, but the nuances of teaching a broad set of concepts required a great deal of focus.  Since this class included several team-based projects, I spent a lot of time coaching the teams on how to successfully complete their assigned presentations and projects. The improvements the students made in areas such as making presentations and preparing business plans demonstrated how they were able to take the concepts of the class and apply them to entrepreneurial projects.
  5. My business focus has been heavily in the business-to-business (B2B) arena, but most of the examples used in this class were business-to-consumer (B2C), since the major projects were tied to the consumer retailing giant TJX (the owner of stores which include Marshalls, TJ Maxx and Homegoods).  I enjoyed applying my marketing background in this somewhat different business context.

In summary, the transition from conducting business to teaching business has proven to be a career change which has many challenging elements.  I enjoy the work, especially when the students progress in learning many new skills over the course of a semester.  I also liked the university environment; Northeastern treats part-time faculty and staff as professionals and I’ve enjoyed my interactions with other professors and the support staff team. So this career change has been a positive one for me and might also work for other business professionals who’d like to apply their career skills in a university environment.

Have you considered a career change which leverages your experiences in a different way?  If you’ve had similar experiences in re-imagining your career or are contemplating such a move, I’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn.

James Rafferty has been active in the worlds of telecommunications, standards and university teaching in a variety of roles. He's been a thought leader in areas such as Voice over IP and Internet fax through his consulting, product management, marketing, writing and standards activities, and he is currently teaching business at Northeastern University. He loves to write and talk about new connections, applications and business models as communications, related technologies and business concepts evolve.

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