Show Notes

What does the journey from a Pre-K classroom to a Vice President of Product Marketing look like? For Maggie Fiorentino, it was a path defined by the core skills she built as an educator. In this episode, Maggie shares her story of transitioning into EdTech, starting with an entry-level sales support role and leveraging her teacher's mindset of "nurturing" and "empathy" to build a successful corporate career.

• A Family of Teachers: Maggie shares her deep roots in education, coming from a family where almost everyone is a teacher.
• The First Step: Why Maggie’s transition began with an entry-level "Sales Support Assistant" role and the importance of being open to learning new corporate skills (like Excel!) from the ground up.
• Your New Classroom: How a teacher's "nurturing" quality is a powerful and directly transferable skill for supporting and enabling internal teams.
• Empathy as a Strategy: Maggie explains why she intentionally built relationships with other departments—from the field sales team to the warehouse—to understand their challenges and become a more effective partner.
• Learn By Doing: A look at her current role at Carnegie Learning and how they support teachers with professional development that puts educators in the student's shoes.

Episode Article

I always love talking to guests who come from a long line of educators. It’s one thing to choose the profession, but it’s another to have it be a part of your family's DNA. My latest guest, Maggie Fiorentino, is one of those people.

Her mom, dad, aunts, uncles, and siblings were all teachers, so it was a natural path for her to become a Special Education and Pre-K teacher. And she was fantastic at it, focusing on one of the most critical and challenging parts of education: helping students and families navigate transitions.

But what happens when the teacher needs to make a transition of her own?

For Maggie, that moment came when her son got older. She was a single mom, and the flexibility of a teacher's schedule had been a blessing. But with her son in high school, she began to wonder what other opportunities might be out there.

Her journey is a masterclass for any teacher wondering how to get a foot in the door of the corporate world. She didn't jump to a senior-level role; she started at the beginning. She applied for and landed an entry-level "Sales Support Assistant" job at a small publisher.

As she explains in our conversation, this new world came with a steep learning curve. "I had been in a classroom," she told me, "I had never used Excel... I'm just a generationally... I used Word to print out papers, and that was it".

This is a fear I hear from so many teachers—the fear of not knowing the "corporate" tools. But Maggie's story shows that those skills can be taught. What can't be taught as easily is the core skill she brought from the classroom: empathy.

Maggie realized that her new "classroom" was the sales team. "I think transferring that nurturing quality I had as a teacher over to the sales team... they're like my customers, they're like my students in a way," she said. She saw her job as supporting them, understanding their needs, and helping them succeed.

She extended this empathy to everyone, describing how she would go down to the warehouse at that first job. She learned the warehouse manager's world, and in turn, he appreciated that she took the time to understand his challenges. She wasn't just "the office," and he wasn't just "the warehouse." They were partners.

That single, transferable skill—the ability to nurture, to build bridges, and to have empathy for the challenges of others—is what Maggie used to build her entire career. Today, she is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Carnegie Learning, a major K-12 curriculum and professional learning provider.

She's still an educator, but now she's scaling her impact, overseeing teams that support teachers all over the country. Her story is such a powerful reminder that the skills you build as a teacher are not just "soft skills." They are essential, strategic, and in-demand skills that can build an incredible career.