5 Career Development Skills Music Educators Are Already Teaching Their Students

In my 23-year career as a high school music teacher, I saw my students go on to some incredible careers. There are GRAMMY winners, Emmy winners, top music professionals. But I’m just as proud of my work serving the 99% of students who went on to careers not in the music field.

Former students are doctors, lawyers, teachers, plumbers, and many other job titles you can think of. When I run into them, we often talk about the lessons learned in music classes that still influence their lives today. How can playing the clarinet help an airline mechanic? What does mastering Count Basie or Earth, Wind & Fire charts have to do with reading medical charts? How does working your way from beginning strings to Tchaikovsky shape a career in electrical engineering?

1. Focus

Distractions fill our lives. I don’t need to convince you of that. These distractions can keep us from being productive and building toward success.

Focus is essential for effective study, deep musical skill, and creative breakthroughs. It’s equally essential for similar success in a professional's chosen career field.

Like riding a bike or throwing a baseball, focus is a skill that can be learned and honed. Music teachers set students up for success by setting the conditions for them to focus. The rehearsal period defines time for intensive work. Students put two hands on their instruments and put the phones away.

In your music classroom, you hone students' ability to focus, and this ability is important in any career field.

2. Skill-Building

The old phrase “practice makes perfect” is incomplete. Not all practice time is equal. Imagine somebody who’s been playing guitar in the local saloon for 30 years. Now imagine the most dedicated guitarist in your high school's jazz program. How does that 30 years of noodling weigh against 3 years of music education?

Music teachers set goals for their students, and keep track of progress along the way. Goals are broken into steps and a schedule is created for when they’ll practice. We identify the areas that students struggle with and we help work through them.

These processes taught in music classrooms apply to any number of non-musical pursuits. Skill-building is an immensely versatile ability that the professional world demands.

3. Teaching and Mentoring

One of my favorite elements of music education is the continual cycle of mentorship. Freshmen become more-knowledgeable sophomores. In their junior and senior years, they take on new roles as mentors to the incoming freshmen.

Many teachers use this pattern to amplify their teaching efforts. The students with better performance skills help those who aren’t quite as far along. These mentor students share what you have taught them. They reinforce the new lessons in a comfortable peer-to-peer way. It also benefits the more experienced students.

These richly beneficial interactions of mentor and apprentice recur throughout our lives. Think of a manager coaching her new hire at a marketing firm. Think of a veteran teacher taking a first-year teacher under his wing. Music education can instill the benefits of that framework in your students. It allows a firsthand experience that they can carry into their professional lives.

4. Leadership

It’s always gratifying watching a player take on a leadership role. Perhaps a student in the band or choir takes on the role of section leader or student conductor. Leadership in the music classroom comes in many forms. It starts with a culture of clear mission, strong communication, and widespread enthusiasm. In other words, for successful music teachers, student leadership is no accident.

Success comes when every member of the ensemble knows the mission. When every member of the ensemble is clear on their goals and responsibilities. When every member of the ensemble feels enthusiasm as part of something bigger than themselves. This environment is ripe for student leadership. These key elements (that you are already doing!) foster a sense of personal ownership and a willingness to take initiative. When communication flows, the ensemble can execute the mission in a coordinated way.

Whole industries exist to break down information silos in the modern workplace, and yet the problems persist. The workplace requires willingness to take initiative and communicate with colleagues. By building collaborative culture, music teachers set their students up for professional success. They encourage personal leadership in their students. The ability to set goals and objectives for team members is foundational for any manager. Music students carry this culture of enthusiastic productivity into their professional lives.

5. Problem-Solving

Some people see a mountain and bemoan the obstacle. Others celebrate the opportunity for a hike. As music teachers, we train our students to look forward to the hike. Approaching a challenge with the right attitude is essential to success.

In ensemble training, we point out ‘problem sections’ all the time. In individual training, we ask our students, “What are you having trouble with?” We define the problem, we break down the problem, we propose possible solutions, we test the results, we repeat as necessary. This pattern occurs in every music classroom, and students start picking it up as habit. With encouragement, it carries beyond our rehearsals into their academic and professional lives

Music teachers transfer these and other lessons to their students as a matter of course. The next step is to connect the dots and let them know these skills are important in the non-musical world. With the modern workplace constantly shifting, these skill sets are more in demand than ever. When I was teaching in the public school music classroom, I wished there were a defined method I could employ to teach and bring attention to these employable skills in a concrete way. This tool would have been valuable to help advocate for music education. I wanted a teaching tool for my classroom and an advocacy tool for my administration.

I posed this challenge to Chris Sampson, the Vice Dean at USC Thornton School of Music. Then I proposed we create a book to meet these needs. He agreed, and took on the task of writing a book of lesson plans. We call it Careers Through Music: Building Employable Skills In Your Music Class . This book of 15 lesson plans covers the skills listed in this article, plus 10 more. If you want to dive deeper into these topics, each 8-minute lesson plan in the book will take little time from a rehearsal period, and have a tremendous positive impact for your students.

Especially for the 99% who go into careers outside of music.