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Job outlook for life science teachers in the United States
Life science teacher job growth summary. After extensive research, interviews, and analysis, Zippia's data science team found that:
The projected life science teacher job growth rate is 5% from 2018-2028.
About 48,700 new jobs for life science teachers are projected over the next decade.
Life science teacher salaries have increased 8% for life science teachers in the last 5 years.
There are over 141,289 life science teachers currently employed in the United States.
There are 76,832 active life science teacher job openings in the US.
The average life science teacher salary is $66,089.
Are life science teacher jobs in demand?
Life science teacher job and salary trends over time
Life science teacher jobs over time
Life science teacher job growth rate over time
| Year | # of jobs | % of population |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 141,289 | 0.04% |
| 2020 | 137,240 | 0.04% |
| 2019 | 143,451 | 0.04% |
| 2018 | 145,628 | 0.04% |
| 2017 | 142,257 | 0.04% |
Average life science teacher salary over time
Life science teacher salary by year
| Year | Avg. salary | Hourly rate | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | $66,089 | $31.77 | +2.0% |
| 2025 | $64,817 | $31.16 | +2.2% |
| 2024 | $63,409 | $30.48 | +1.9% |
| 2023 | $62,200 | $29.90 | +2.0% |
| 2022 | $61,001 | $29.33 | +1.5% |
Life science teacher jobs by state
Most common states for life science teachers
| Rank | State | Population | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | 693,972 | 174 | 25% |
| 2 | New Hampshire | 1,342,795 | 232 | 17% |
| 3 | Montana | 1,050,493 | 164 | 16% |
| 4 | New Jersey | 9,005,644 | 1,228 | 14% |
| 5 | Massachusetts | 6,859,819 | 964 | 14% |
| 6 | Maryland | 6,052,177 | 848 | 14% |
| 7 | Delaware | 961,939 | 130 | 14% |
| 8 | Colorado | 5,607,154 | 727 | 13% |
| 9 | Minnesota | 5,576,606 | 725 | 13% |
| 10 | New Mexico | 2,088,070 | 271 | 13% |
| 11 | Vermont | 623,657 | 80 | 13% |
| 12 | Illinois | 12,802,023 | 1,570 | 12% |
| 13 | Nebraska | 1,920,076 | 239 | 12% |
| 14 | Wyoming | 579,315 | 68 | 12% |
| 15 | Nevada | 2,998,039 | 317 | 11% |
| 16 | Kansas | 2,913,123 | 314 | 11% |
| 17 | Rhode Island | 1,059,639 | 117 | 11% |
| 18 | Virginia | 8,470,020 | 858 | 10% |
| 19 | Iowa | 3,145,711 | 309 | 10% |
| 20 | Idaho | 1,716,943 | 180 | 10% |
Most common cities for life science teachers
| Rank | City | # of jobs | Employment/ 1000ppl | Avg. salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brooklyn Center | 2 | 6% | $56,743 |
| 2 | San Mateo | 1 | 1% | $61,797 |
| 3 | Santa Clara | 1 | 1% | $61,610 |
| 4 | South San Francisco | 1 | 1% | $61,766 |
| 5 | Los Angeles | 1 | 0% | $57,458 |
Life Science Teacher job outlook: Expert opinions
Our panel of life science teacher experts
University of Central Arkansas
University of Central Arkansas
Emory University
University of Rhode Island
San Diego State University
Robert Morris University
University of Colorado Denver
Horacio Ferriz Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Geology and HydrogeologyWhat will help Life Science Teachers increase their earning potential?
Horacio Ferriz Ph.D.: Take some of your basic requirements for a Teaching Credential in your junior and senior years at college (Adolescent Psychology, Foundations of Secondary Education), and make sure to log some hours helping a local STEM teacher in the classroom.
What general advice would you give to a Life Science Teacher?
Horacio Ferriz Ph.D.: We have a critical lack of good teachers in the STEM disciplines, so pursuing this path will practically guarantee you a teaching position anywhere you care to live. We also need good journalism in the STEM disciplines, because there is so much misinformation out there.
What Life Science Teacher skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?
Horacio Ferriz Ph.D.: Hopefully you have it real clear in your mind that you want to pursue a career in Science Education, at the Elementary or Middle School level. If you have your sights on becoming a High School teacher you would be much better off pursuing a traditional major in Geology, Physics, Chemistry, or Biology. Physical Science would also be a good platform to pursue a career as a Science Journalist.
Dr. Nina Roofe Ph.D.
Associate Professor & ChairUniversity of Central Arkansas
Department of Nutrition & Family Sciences
What skills stand out on Life Science Teacher resumes?
Dr. Nina Roofe Ph.D.: The impact of your teaching on students is what employers are looking for in a resume. Provide examples of student learning outcomes, how you targeted areas that needed improvement, how you used research to determine the best intervention for the situation, and the results of your intervention. The process you used is just as important as the results. Your ability to identify gaps in the curriculum and develop new courses or teaching units shows initiative and high-level skills. Include metrics such as the number of lesson plans developed each term, number of individualized education plans (IEP) per academic year, and committees you serve on or chair.
What soft skills should all Life Science Teachers possess?
Dr. Nina Roofe Ph.D.: Collegiality is the most important soft skill an educator can possess. This is seen in how educators interact with each other and conduct themselves in their schools. Participating in peer teaching consultations objectively and willingly sharing ideas to support new educators shows your dedication to the teaching profession and commitment to mentoring new professionals. Demonstrating flexibility with scheduling and room assignments, sharing materials and space, assisting colleagues, and team teaching when appropriate are examples of collegiality in action. Attending meetings and participating positively and professionally communicates respect for others and the value you place on your peers and supervisor. Leadership skills are essential for navigating parent-teacher conferences and earning the respect of parents. Demonstrating leadership also demonstrates to administration your FCS skills in conflict resolution and financial management. Good communication skills are critical for effective teaching. This relates to our ability to deliver the lesson's content and provide feedback to our students. Teamwork and collaborative problem solving are essential to a functional campus. With collaboration and respectful dialogue, a school can be innovative in resolving challenges. Social and emotional intelligence ensures safety for students and colleagues, promotes a positive learning environment, and provides the foundation for a growth mindset. Finally, cultural awareness is a critical soft skill all educators must achieve. We are required to understand our students to relate to them and effectively educate them across cultures and demographics.
Dr. Nina Roofe Ph.D.
Associate Professor & ChairUniversity of Central Arkansas
Department of Nutrition & Family Sciences
What type of skills will young Life Science Teachers need?
Dr. Nina Roofe Ph.D.: Employers expect young FCS professionals to be proficient with technology, leadership, and communication. For example:
-Technology skills including Microsoft Office software programs, professional emails (attachments, forward with attachments), protecting against spyware/viruses/malware, text, access professional databases, using a PC or MAC, creating and maintaining a professional LinkedIn page, and establishing privacy settings on all social media accounts.
-Leadership skills include dealing with conflicts and disagreements quickly and kindly, asking open-ended questions to draw out information, active listening, recognizing the contributions and ideas of others-giving credit, achieving goals and objectives within budget and on time, keeping your word, developing and implement action plans, establish goals, make decisions under pressure and/or with limited information, update your skills and knowledge regularly-be a life-long learner.
-Communication skills, including speaking, body language, reading, writing, and listening, are important. Often young professionals feel they know everything, and they do know a lot, but need to realize they still have much to learn. It is important to keep their audience and the purpose of their communication in mind.
Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Life Science Teachers?
Anita Corbett Ph.D.: Yes--we all agree that there will be a back log of eligible applicants due to hiring freezes and lack of ability to gain relevant experience due to limited access to research experiences during the pandemic.
What's a day at work look like for a Life Science Teacher?
Anita Corbett Ph.D.: It depends on what job they have- also are we talking graduates from undergraduate education or from graduate training?
What will help Life Science Teachers increase their earning potential?
Anita Corbett Ph.D.: They should appropriately market their skills--and seek additional training to enhance their core skills--certificates that demonstrate this additional training has been obtained can be valuable.
What experience really stands out on Life Science Teacher resumes?
Edward Bozzi: Having had one or more successful internships with a biotechnology company or organization is most important on a resume. I also think listing practiced lab skills is important.
Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Life Science Teachers?
Edward Bozzi: I think the pandemic has emphasized the value of Biotechnology. Right now, eight recent graduates of URI's Biotechnology Program are working on the vaccine at Moderna. Local companies like EpiVax, a vaccine design company, are collaborating with a number of vaccine producing companies. Our Biotechnology students routinely intern there, and some are hired permanently. I see even more opportunities for Biotechnology graduates post COVID-19.
What type of skills will young Life Science Teachers need?
Edward Bozzi: If graduates have very good wet lab skills, i.e., cell culturing, and that need will continue. Bioinformatics will be of increasing importance in the future. And graduates will have to be more knowledgeable in that area.
What Life Science Teacher skills would you recommend for someone trying to advance their career?
Kevin Hovel Ph.D.: This is pretty much the same answer to question 1. Look for opportunities to volunteer in research programs. Helping graduate students with their projects is very common. One thing that is sometimes overlooked when students are getting research experience is experience handling data. This involves organizing data, doing quality checks, and visually assessing the data (graphically) and statistically. Statistical analysis is another area in which students also tend to have less experience entering graduate school. A student will have a leg up on others if they have at least the basic understanding of standard analyses used in their field of study.
What technology do you think will become more important and prevalent for Life Science Teachers in the next 3-5 years?
Kevin Hovel Ph.D.: This is a hard question because Biology is extremely broad as a discipline. I am an ecologist, and my research is mostly outdoors and underwater. My research is pretty "low tech." For cell and molecular biologists, or evolutionary biologists, the technology applied is vastly different. I think many of those folks would answer with things like genomics (in particular, CRISPR), metagenomics, and bioinformatics. But your best bet is to ask some of them. I suggest Ricardo Zayas (rzayas@sdsu.edu) and Lluvia Flores-Renteria (lfloresrenteria@sdsu.edu).
What experience really stands out on Life Science Teacher resumes?
Kevin Hovel Ph.D.: What stands out is research experience in which a student has completed an independent project. Being involved in an ongoing research program in a university lab is excellent and very valuable. Still, the extra value is placed on the completion of an independent research project by the student. This demonstrates self-motivation and follow-through. Typically an independent project culminates in a presentation or report, or both. These also are precious experiences to list on a resume. Limited ability to communicate the results of research projects is a common weakness for students, in written form or orally.
What experience really stands out on Life Science Teacher resumes?
Maria Kalevitch Ph.D.: Well-rounded experience, along with technical skills, soft skills should be included like customer service/sales, ability to present and communicate with the customer, innovative approach to tasks, thinking about systems not just a part of the project, teamwork but also ability to think independently, life-long learning and passion to the profession, to name a few.
How do you envision technology impacting Life Science Teachers in the next 5 years?
Maria Kalevitch Ph.D.: Technology will be disruptive in the best sense possible; as an example, it will combine the tools like AI with humans/human factor to strengthen the educational field, and as an ROI-better prepared college graduates with industry input and collaboration.
Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Life Science Teachers?
Maria Kalevitch Ph.D.: In each obstacle, we should see an opportunity; this opportunity can be used to better the future of higher education; it is an evolutionary process that helps to use what we learn and bring it to the next level. To add - being adaptive, flexible, and agile
Will there be an enduring impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Life Science Teachers?
Joshua French Ph.D.: Absolutely, and in different ways. The pandemic has changed the playing field in terms of winners and losers.
Companies that experienced increased demand for their services (e.g., Zoom, Amazon, Target) during the pandemic can increase the size of their data teams. Companies that rely on crowds of people (e.g., travel, some types of marketing) may be seeing cutbacks or furloughs. It seems likely that the winners will further consolidate their gains to move into new markets. I expect that this will change the kinds of companies hiring data teams for quite a while.
A major change is where we work. While there will always be a need for corporate offices of some sort, employers and employees are experiencing the benefits of working remotely. Companies won't need to lease huge offices to house their employees, while also saving on supplies and utilities. I suspect that companies will be much more open to remote employees in the future. Employees also realize the tangible benefits of not having a commute and may not be as willing to move for a job. Combining those two factors, graduates will have much more freedom about "where" they can work. If I can conveniently work for companies across the country from the comfort of my home, then my job and career options are greatly expanded.
Current graduates will need to be very careful about salary and compensation moving forward. I have heard conflicting reports about whether job offers are comparable to what was available prior to the pandemic. While some opportunities are as strong as pre-pandemic, I suspect that with recent furloughs, there is more employee demand for new jobs than the supply of new jobs. What this means is that employers can reduce their salary offers because the pool of laborers willing to work for less is greater. A person who takes a lower-paying job will need to be more proactive in climbing the ladder and willing to change companies to improve salary and benefits. The fastest way to increase your salary is to move to a new job that is willing to pay more. This will be more important for recent graduates. Many articles have shown the challenges faced by millennials taking jobs right out of the Economic Crisis of 2008-2009. They entered the market with lower pay and have struggled to break out of the cycle of being underpaid. That could easily happen to current and recent graduates without effort.
Are there any particularly good places in the United States for Life Science Teachers to find work opportunities?
Joshua French Ph.D.: With employers increasingly allowing their employees to work from him, particularly in knowledge-driven jobs such as statistics, the physical location of a job won't be as important in the future. However, you can expect that the majority of jobs will still be in larger cities with large tech and corporate presence. In the immediate future, states allowing companies more flexibility in operating normally will see a relative increase in the number of statistics jobs, as companies will be able to increase the amount of business performed in those areas.
How do you envision technology impacting Life Science Teachers in the next 5 years?
Joshua French Ph.D.: Technology will implement statistics in a multitude of ways.
One of the major impacts of technology on statistics is going to be the ability to effectively measure new things, measure them at a higher resolution or with more accuracy, and to obtain more measurements much more inexpensively. Statistical models can be no better than the data that are used to build them. While many focus on the overall volume of data, such as tech companies being able to rapidly compile petabytes of data, I don't anticipate that having a huge impact on statisticians with the exception that our methods must scale dramatically better. What I'm more interested in is using technological improvements to get better measurements of things that were previously difficult to measure. Statisticians will be needed much more frequently in the future as investigators from medicine, physics, and sports are able to produce much higher quality data for which statistical models can be reasonably built.
The ability to work in both Python and R will continue to become more important. Statisticians have still favor R as a programming language, but the more general popularity of Python will require statisticians to become fluent in both languages. And while R continues to hold strong advantages over Python in terms of visualization, data manipulation, and cutting edge statistical models, the need to collaborate with others fluent in Python will require statisticians to expand their abilities in Python. It will be quite interesting to see whether the Julia language can also gain some real momentum in statistics and data science. On a technical level, the language has advantages over both R and Python. However, as a relative newcomer, it simply doesn't have the diversity of methods the other two systems offer, and since it still has a much smaller user base, its more difficult to collaborate with others.
The COVID pandemic is going to usher a wave of new technology attempting to make virtual collaboration easier. Right now, the height of collaboration for many mathematicians and statisticians is working in front of a whiteboard with a web camera pointed at them. While this will work for the short term, this has highlighted the need for more accessible options for collaboration. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack will continue to incorporate new features making collaboration and consultation more interactive and seamless. Yet unavailable (or at least not widely known) technology will need to be adopted in mass to make these experiences close to as effective as in-person meetings. Having seen the promise of virtual collaboration and meetings during the pandemic, businesses will push to make these changes permanent to save incredible amounts of their budget that was previously spent on flights, hotels, per diem, etc. Statisticians are going to need to educate themselves in these areas to keep up with the rapidly changing world of online collaboration. We've been quite comfortable in our patterns for many years, but that is going to change rapidly.