How to switch careers from teaching to corporate in Sri Lanka

Your colleagues at Colombo International School just announced a new department head. Your five-year plan said you'd be there too. But last week you sat in a Zoom call for a training manager role at Virtusa and felt more alive than you have in years. That feeling matters — and the path is shorter than you think.

Why Sri Lankan teachers make strong corporate hires

Corporate Sri Lanka is quietly hungry for people who can simplify complexity, hold a room, and move others to action. Teachers do all three before 10 a.m. every day. Companies like WSO2, IFS, and John Keells Holdings have entire functions — Learning & Development, Corporate Training, Operations, Client Success — where ex-teachers consistently outperform people who came up through conventional routes.

The hiring managers who struggle to see this are focused on job titles. Your job is to reframe the conversation before it starts.

Skills that transfer directly

Teaching is deceptively technical work. Here's what maps cleanly to corporate roles:

• Curriculum design → L&D content development: If you've built a term plan, you've built a learning pathway. The vocabulary is different; the logic is identical.
• Classroom management → Facilitation and stakeholder management: Holding thirty teenagers' attention beats most MBA modules in applied people management.
• Assessment design → Quality assurance and evaluation: Writing term papers and rubrics is close cousin to building KPI frameworks.
• Parent communication → Client-facing communication: Explaining a failing grade to an anxious parent is harder than most corporate client conversations.
• Resource allocation on a school budget → Department budget ownership: Running a department on Sri Lankan public sector funding is genuine constraint-based planning.

Where teachers typically land first

The corporate doors that open fastest in Sri Lanka:

• Learning & Development roles at Dialog, Hemas, or Virtusa — large enough to have dedicated internal training functions
• Corporate training companies that contract with Sampath Bank or Commercial Bank to train frontline staff
• NGO and development sector — organisations implementing USAID or UN programmes actively seek educators for programme officer roles
• Education technology — regional startups building LMS platforms or tutoring apps need people who understand how learning actually works
• Operations or customer experience at financial institutions — CBSL-regulated banks want people who write clearly and speak well in English and Sinhala

Salary resets are real but not catastrophic. A senior teacher earning LKR 80,000–120,000 can expect a Colombo-based L&D coordinator role to start around LKR 100,000–145,000, with a meaningfully faster growth curve once performance reviews kick in.

Rewriting your CV for a corporate audience

Your current CV probably lists subjects taught and school names. That won't move a corporate HR screener past the first page. Rewrite every bullet point around outcomes:

"Designed and delivered a 12-week competency framework for 180 secondary students, achieving a 94% pass rate — 11 points above the national average."

That sentence works in a corporate CV. "Taught A/L Business Studies at XYZ College" does not. Follow this structure on every line: action verb → scope → measurable result.

Also: drop the photograph unless explicitly requested. Remove "Date of Birth" and "Religion" — standard in school CVs, unnecessary in corporate applications and potential sources of bias.

Handling the "starting fresh" question

Interviewers will sometimes ask, directly or indirectly, whether you're comfortable taking a step back. Answer it head-on:

"I've chosen to move into this field because I want to build in this direction for the next decade. I'm not expecting to walk in as a senior hire — I'm expecting to prove myself quickly and grow from there."

That combination of self-awareness and ambition reads well to most corporate hiring managers. What reads poorly is vagueness, or overclaiming how directly your classroom experience maps to the new role.

Your first six months in corporate

The culture shock is real. Meetings that start late. Email threads longer than term reports. Hierarchy that's visible but rarely acknowledged directly. A few things help:

• Ask your manager what a "win" looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days — and write it down
• Learn how decisions actually get made; it's rarely the org chart
• Find one peer who will tell you things the formal onboarding won't

The corporate world will sometimes feel less purposeful than a classroom. Give yourself a full year before drawing conclusions.

The teachers who make this transition successfully don't wait for the perfect role or the complete CV. They take one calculated step, prove something specific, and build from there. Your decade in front of a class isn't a liability — it's the credibility gap most corporate people spend years trying to close.