If you do so much as a quick Google search, you’ll find many stories about people taking the education to customer success pipeline. But why is this? And what are the skills that make it so common?  

These are the questions we’re hoping to answer today. Specifically, in this article we’ll cover: 

  • Why transition to customer success
  • Notable transferable skills
  • Key differences between the professions
  • Skills to work on before making the transition

Let’s get going. 

Why transition to customer success?

So, the first thing to address is why should this transition be made in the first place. We’ve already said it’s quite a common pipeline, so what motivates these career shifts?

As with most career changes, the motivation can be anything from work-life balance to exploring your transferable skills, but why are teachers choosing customer success? 

Customer success is similar to teaching in that it nurtures growth and learning within customers. While in the classroom, educators guide students toward their academic goals, customer success professionals do something similar.

Instead of textbooks and lesson plans, customer success managers work with products and services. The "students" become valued clients, each with unique objectives and challenges. 

In essence, the core of the work within these two roles remains similar. In many ways, customer success almost feels like teaching on a grand scale.

It’s all about finding where you fit. Megan Wardwell said regarding her own transition to customer success: 

“I realized that my work-life balance was all out of whack and just something had to give. And knowing that I kind of always had in the back of my mind I wasn’t happy with where I was teaching. I was trying to find that place. And I knew that I needed to make some kind of a change, in order for myself to stay sane. Because with everything going on in my life things were kind of turbulent.”

So let’s look at why customer success comes up as a common career transition for teachers. It’s all about the transferable skills…

Notable transferable skills

When it comes to customer success, teachers are particularly adept at the role because it works well with the skills they’re already well versed in. Things like: 

  • - Communication
  • - Problem-solving
  • - Adaptability
  • - Project management
  • - Leadership
  • - Creativity
  • - Empathy
  • - Instructional design
  • - Training and onboarding
  • - Strategic planning
  • - Accountability

As you can see, there’s a lot of crossover. But which are the most important? 

We’d say the three top transferable skills are: 

  1. Project management - This one is an easy top pick. Teaching roles are always juggling a variety of different goals within the classroom and customer success is no different. The main difference here is that customer success deals with more open-ended timelines. Where teachers are beholden to term times and exam seasons, customer success projects can work consistently throughout the year (and into future years too!).  

  1. Training and onboarding - Those first few months of a new year are the most important when making students feel comfortable in school and making it a safe place to learn, make mistakes, and grow. The same goes for customers - Working with customers through the first few months with a new product or service will ensure that they’ll remain with you for a long time. 

  1. Empathy - As with teaching, customer success professionals tend to be the first point of contact for regular customers (i.e. students) and trickier customers (i.e. parents!). Listening, engaging, and relating to the issues brought to you will make you skilled in understanding how to solve each issue so all parties are happy. 

Key differences between education and customer success

Education does have its differences to the customer success field, namely in that CS is built within business structures. They have different goals, though they may go about achieving them in similar ways. 

Remember, CS is still involved in the business cycle and funnel with the main goal of making a profit and ensuring lasting and successful sales. 

This is different from the goals of teaching, but as we mentioned in the previous section, teaching has a strong set of transferable skills to set you apart from the rest. (The same might not be true for the reverse.) 

So, let’s lay out the most important differences: 

1. Primary goal

As we’ve said, education aims to impart knowledge and develop skills. While customer success secondary goals may align with this too, the primary goal of a CS manager is to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product/service.

2. Motivation

Education is utilized by students for personal growth, career preparation, and other certification. While CS may align with this when working in edTech companies, the general motivation for customer success is to maximize value from a purchased product/service.

3. Measurement of success

This is an area where many teachers may need the most adjustment. In education, success is based on things like grades, test scores, and skill demonstration. Customer success metrics will include things like customer retention, satisfaction, and product adoption rates.

This data won’t be something usually applied to education, so this is an area that those aspiring to become CS professionals may benefit from learning a bit about prior to their new role. 

Skills to work on before transitioning into customer success

So, we’ve said how some parts of the role may be different, but what skills should those currently in education be working on before making the transition to customer success? 

Business analysis

Teachers transitioning to customer success need to understand how businesses operate and make decisions.

Not only do you have to understand the information you’re getting from customers, data, and other parts of the business, but you also have to be able to analyze this information and make informed decisions. 

Getting well-versed in this type of analysis will enable you to identify customer needs and pain points (and patterns within them), align these solutions with overall business goals, and provide actionable insights to other teams and stakeholders. 

Business acumen

Moving into the business space is daunting no matter when you make the leap. Understanding how individual businesses work, and how they interact with the market as a whole is vital.

Teachers should also take the time to learn about the most common business models they could come across, as well as the most common industries that use customer success. 

On top of all this, there’s knowing the lingo. Business speak comes with a lot of acronyms and jargon that can be difficult to keep up with when you’re hearing it in a casual conversation for the first time. But you’ll have to know these if you want to make client conversation as smooth as possible. 

Another important role of developing this skill is that it’ll help you recognize the role your product or service has within your industry of choice, how it helps clients, and how it’s different from any competitors. 

Data modeling

In customer success, data-driven decision-making is key. Customer success goes beyond mere analysis; you’ll have to be able to create frameworks to track things like customer health and success metrics. Data modeling is vital to understand if you want to create frameworks that, well, work. 

Data modeling is also a skill that develops your ability to predict customer behaviors. Working on this skill will make it that much easier to identify at-risk accounts and act accordingly.

How systems and data play a pivotal role in CS Operations
In this article, I’m going to go into detail looking at my customer success journey so far; the data points to track and the benefits of leveraging them in your CS operations; the building blocks of customer success systems and data; how to maximize data to drive further success for customers.
Customer Success CollectiveMinna Vaisanen

Building towards customer success careers

If you're looking for a way to tone your customer success skills before diving into the role itself, we've got just the thing.

Crafted with some of the brightest and most experienced minds in the industry, our customer success course has been designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge needed to set you and your customers up for success. 

By the end of this course you'll be able to:

  • Understand metrics
  • Advocate for customers
  • Build a CS strategy 

Sounds good?

Get CS Certified today

P.s. Looking for something a bit more specific? We've got a ton of courses for each of the main parts of the customer success role.