One of the biggest differences between working in schools and working in business and industry is the lack of a clear and unambiguous measure of success; in the vernacular, we can say, “schools lack a clear bottom line.” In education, they attempt to use test scores as a bottom line comparable to financial measures in business, but many educators find those to be a weak proxy for learning.
While the weak bottom line does change the nature of IT configurations in schools, it does not change the expectations of functional IT. While access to functioning IT is necessary for school operations, most teachers can continue to educate children (for the short term) without IT. When schools experience power outages so IT is not available, classes may be able to continue with different (but still valuable lessons). The same is true of IT outages. While no school IT professional wants their systems to be unavailable, and they respond with a sense of urgency to outages, the urgency is different compared to that when a business’ bottom line is directly and adversely affected by IT outages. These and other factors make schools workplaces where IT professionals experience less job-related stress when they work in school compared to when they work in business and industries.