Privacy-friendly analytics help us see which jobs people explore. They stay off unless you agree.Analytics off unless you agree. Details

Read the record
Back to the river
Skip to sources
Time Machine

Self-enrichment teachers

Also called Community education instructor, Continuing education instructor, Personal enrichment instructor, Recreational class instructor, Craft teacher

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 332,110 US self-enrichment teachers, with median pay of $46,800 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 15,000 from 1834, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for self-enrichment teachers: YouTube and early online course platforms, 2005 to 2015. The online course platforms bifurcated the self-enrichment teaching workforce into a high-earnings, high-scale creator layer and a persisting in-person layer with flat wages.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 3.5% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Self-enrichment teachers: jobs and pay since 1834 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3021

Chicago

Future History. "Self-enrichment teachers: jobs and pay since 1834." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3021.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_3021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Self-enrichment teachers: jobs and pay since 1834}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Lyceum Lecturer / Popular Instructor (Lyceum movement era)
Known then as Chautauqua Instructor / Correspondence Tutor (Chautauqua and correspondence school era)
Known then as Adult Education Instructor / Recreation Teacher (community center and YMCA era)
Known then as Continuing Education Instructor / Personal Enrichment Teacher (community college era)
Known then as Self-Enrichment Teachers (BLS SOC 25-3021)
Known today as Self-Enrichment Teachers (BLS SOC 25-3021)
Projected to still be called Self-Enrichment Teachers (BLS SOC 25-3021)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
332K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$46,800
Est.

≈ $45,600 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1826

Josiah Holbrook founds the first American lyceum in Millbury, Massachusetts. He publishes his plan for mutual-improvement societies in the American Journal of Education the same year, calling for a national network of local associations for adult learning. By 1834 roughly 3,000 lyceums exist across the United States. Holbrook believed "education was a lifelong experience" and that ordinary working adults deserved access to science and the useful arts. His lyceum curriculum, centered on chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and mechanics, was the first large-scale model of non-credentialed adult instruction in American history.

Beat · 1874

John Heyl Vincent and Lewis Miller found the Chautauqua Institution on the shore of Chautauqua Lake in western New York, initially to train Sunday school teachers. The program quickly expands to general education, the arts, and popular entertainment. By 1878 they launch the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the first book club in American history, pairing home reading with guided correspondence study. At the movement's peak in the mid-1920s, circuit Chautauquas appear in over 10,000 communities to audiences exceeding 45 million. The movement then declines as radio and film offer competing forms of home entertainment.

Beat · 1893

The Boston YMCA begins offering liberal arts and vocational courses at scale, initiating what would become a network of YMCA educational institutions. By 1950 the Y operates 20 colleges in American cities. Many of these schools eventually spin off as independent institutions; several are now accredited universities. This YMCA educational infrastructure created a major employment channel for enrichment and continuing-education instructors through the early 20th century.

Beat · 1948

Indra Devi opens the first yoga studio in Los Angeles at 8806 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. She is the first woman to study under the yoga guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, and she builds her Hollywood studio into a celebrity institution (Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson among her students). Devi's school and her 1953 book "Forever Young, Forever Healthy" make yoga respectable in mainstream American culture, opening the path for the studio-yoga industry that would eventually employ tens of thousands of instructors and account for a substantial share of the self-enrichment teaching workforce.

Beat · 1963

February 11, 1963: Julia Child's "The French Chef" debuts on WGBH Boston, later distributed through the PBS network. The show runs for a decade, wins a Peabody Award and an Emmy, and creates the first celebrity enrichment instructor on American television. Child demonstrates, in 26 minutes per episode, that a skilled in-person teacher can transmit craft across a broadcast medium without losing the warmth and immediacy that makes instruction effective. Millions of Americans learn to make boeuf bourguignon, hollandaise, and croissants from a television teacher. The show establishes public broadcasting as a legitimate delivery channel for enrichment instruction and previews the creator-educator model.

Beat · 1966

The federal Adult Education Act of 1966 provides the first substantial federal funding for adult and continuing education programs, including non-vocational enrichment courses. Community colleges respond by designating continuing education as a third institutional mission alongside academic transfer and vocational training. The Act legitimizes adult enrichment instruction as a public-policy priority and channels enrollment into a workforce of community college adjunct instructors who teach cooking, arts, languages, and personal development for below-median wages.

Beat · 1975

Yoga Journal is founded in 1975, becoming the primary trade publication of the American yoga instruction industry. By 2016 an Ipsos study finds 36.7 million Americans practicing yoga, and the yoga industry is valued at $16 billion. The number of yoga instructors registered with Yoga Alliance grows from zero (founded 1999) to over 100,000 by the 2010s. Yoga instruction becomes the single largest sub-specialty within the self-enrichment teaching workforce, alongside fitness instruction which BLS eventually separates into its own occupational category (39-9031).

Beat · 2009

Udemy is founded in 2009 as an open online course marketplace, allowing any instructor to publish a course for sale to a global audience. Skillshare launches in 2010; Coursera in 2012. These platforms dissolve the geographic constraint that had shaped self-enrichment teaching since the lyceum era. By 2024, Udemy reports 210,000 courses for 67 million learners. Coursera and Udemy announce a merger in 2026, creating a combined platform with 290 million learners and 95,000 instructors. The online platform era bifurcates the enrichment teaching workforce into high-earning creator-educators and persisting in-person instructors, with the BLS median wage ($45,590) concealing a distribution that runs from minimum-wage adjunct yoga instructors to six-figure Udemy course authors.

Beat · 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic forces the closure of in-person enrichment studios and community college continuing-education programs beginning in March 2020. Self-enrichment teachers pivot to Zoom classes, Instagram live cooking demonstrations, and asynchronous video content with remarkable speed. Many discover that their Zoom audiences are geographically broader than their in-person classes ever were. The pandemic compresses what might have been a decade of online adoption into 18 months. When studios reopen, a hybrid model persists: many students prefer the convenience of online sessions even after in-person options return. The pandemic raises the technical floor for the profession: digital delivery is now a baseline expectation for a self-enrichment instructor, not an advanced specialty.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace self-enrichment teachers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+3.5%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-3021 (Self-enrichment teachers): 419.1 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 433.7 thousand in 2035, a change of +14.6 thousand (+3.5%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (14.9% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
38%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-3021.00 Self-Enrichment Teachers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.38, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.2 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.56; GPT-4-rated β 0.36. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for self-enrichment teachers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMarket classes and manage enrollment as an independent instructor: write class descriptions, promotional emails, and social content

Market classes and manage enrollment as an independent instructor: write class descriptions, promotional emails, and social content; use AI writing assistants for copy drafts; track registrations and send communications through scheduling or CRM tools; respond to prospective student inquiries.[8],[6]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Use AI to draft marketing copy quickly but inject your own voice on review. Generic AI promotional language ("Transform your life!") reads as hollow and undermines the personal relationship that is your competitive advantage over mass-market apps. One distinctive sentence about what your specific class offers is worth more than three AI-polished paragraphs.

AI is sitting alongside you hereBuild and maintain online course offerings on platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific: use AI course-builder features to structure curriculum and generate module descriptions, configure sales pages, set up email sequences, and monitor student completion rates and engagement analytics.

Build and maintain online course offerings on platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, or Thinkific: use AI course-builder features to structure curriculum and generate module descriptions, configure sales pages, set up email sequences, and monitor student completion rates and engagement analytics.[8],[13],[12]

Where your edge is

Treat the AI course-builder scaffold as a starting structure. The platform-generated outline and copy lower the production barrier, but pricing, community tone, and the course's differentiated promise still require your judgment. Monitor completion rates: low completion signals a curriculum problem, not a marketing problem.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign curriculum, lesson plans, and unit structures for enrichment courses

Design curriculum, lesson plans, and unit structures for enrichment courses; use AI planning tools (MagicSchool, Kajabi AI) to generate initial outlines, sequence activities, and draft supporting materials, then revise outputs to fit the specific student group and teaching context.[14],[8],[13]

Where your edge is

Use AI-generated lesson outlines as a starting scaffold, not a finished plan. The scaffold handles the blank-page problem; your domain expertise and knowledge of your specific students determine which activities actually work. Build a library of tested modifications so AI outputs get more useful over time.

Where self-enrichment teachers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Training and Development Specialists

Self-enrichment teachers already do the core work of training and development specialists: needs assessment, learning-objective setting, curriculum design, facilitation, and progress evaluation. The pivot is largely a context switch from recreational to workplace learning. Corporate L&D employers actively seek candidates with instructor backgrounds, and the AI tools used in both roles overlap (MagicSchool equivalents in Articulate 360, AI course builders). BLS projects employment growth for Training and Development Specialists through 2034.

What you'd add
  • · Instructional design frameworks (ADDIE model, Kirkpatrick evaluation)
  • · Corporate LMS administration (Workday Learning, Cornerstone, LinkedIn Learning)
  • · Articulate Storyline 360 or Rise for eLearning course development
  • · Adult learning theory (andragogy) applied to workplace performance contexts
  • · Needs analysis methods: job task analysis, skills gap surveys, ROI measurement
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of self-enrichment teachers changed since 1826?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Lyceum circuit and lecture hall (oral instruction, printed broadsheets, specimen collections)

    The lyceum instructor's toolkit in the 1826-1880 era was primarily the spoken word, supplemented by printed lecture syllabi, hand-drawn diagrams, and physical specimen collections for science demonstrations. Josiah Holbrook himself built and sold scientific apparatus kits to lyceums for use in mineralogy and chemistry demonstrations. The traveling lecturer's entire delivery depended on presence and rhetoric; no recording, no amplification, no projected images. The technical advance of this era was the railroad, which made national lecture circuits feasible by 1840 and turned a handful of elite Boston and New York speakers into nationally known figures.

  • Correspondence courses and printed syllabi (International Correspondence Schools, 1891)

    The International Correspondence Schools (ICS), founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1891, popularized the model of structured self-improvement learning delivered entirely by mail. By 1906 ICS had enrolled over one million students in subjects ranging from mine engineering to bookkeeping to English composition. Correspondence instruction decoupled the enrichment teacher from physical co-presence for the first time: a course author in Scranton could teach a coal miner in Wyoming. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878 as part of the Chautauqua movement, was the first book club in American history and introduced the guided home-reading course as a legitimate adult-education format. Together, correspondence and directed-reading programs created the template for every asynchronous online course that Coursera and Udemy would later offer.

    Effect on the work

    Correspondence schooling allowed a single instructor to author content once and deliver it to thousands of students without additional labor, an early preview of the scalability that digital platforms later amplified. ICS's one million enrollees were served by a relatively small faculty of course designers.

  • Radio and television instruction (first educational TV license, 1945; Julia Child on PBS, 1963)

    Educational radio broadcasting began in the 1920s; by the 1930s the University of Wisconsin and other institutions were delivering adult-education content over public airwaves. The Federal Communications Commission reserved educational television channels starting in 1945, and the first dedicated educational television stations went on air in the early 1950s. The pivotal moment for self-enrichment instruction on television was February 11, 1963, when Julia Child's "The French Chef" debuted on WGBH Boston (now distributed via PBS). The show ran for a decade, won a Peabody Award and an Emmy, and created the first television celebrity instructor. Millions of Americans who would never enroll in a formal cooking school learned to cook French food from a public-television teacher. This moment established the broadcast personality as a legitimate enrichment-instruction format and previewed the creator-educator model that YouTube and Udemy later institutionalized.

    Effect on the work

    Television instruction reached mass audiences at near-zero marginal cost per additional viewer, concentrating audience attention on a small number of highly visible personalities while the far larger workforce of in-person enrichment teachers remained invisible in community centers and studios. The celebrity effect began here.

  • Community college continuing-education division (post-Adult Education Act 1966)

    The federal Adult Education Act of 1966 provided funding for adult and continuing education programs, and community colleges responded by adding continuing-education divisions as a core institutional mission alongside academic transfer and vocational training. Through the 1970s and 1980s, community college continuing-education catalogs became the primary marketplace for enrichment instruction: cooking, ceramics, photography, yoga, language conversation, financial planning, and everything else an adult might want to learn without earning college credit. The community college gave self-enrichment teachers institutional infrastructure: scheduling, facilities, marketing, and a flow of students they did not have to recruit themselves. The trade-off was low pay; community college adjuncts in continuing education were among the lowest-compensated instructors in any educational setting.

    Effect on the work

    Community college continuing education created a large, stable demand channel for self-enrichment teachers through the 1970s and 1980s, roughly coinciding with the expansion of the workforce from an estimated 120,000 in 1970 toward the 200,000-plus range by 2000.

  • YouTube and early online course platforms (YouTube 2005, Udemy 2009, Coursera 2012, Skillshare 2010)

    YouTube launched in 2005 and within two years hosted millions of instructional videos, most of them made by individuals with no institutional affiliation. The first wave of online course platforms followed: Skillshare launched in 2010, Udemy in 2010, and Coursera in 2012. For the first time, the marginal cost of reaching an additional student was essentially zero. The platforms rapidly attracted tens of millions of enrolled students. Udemy reported tens of millions of learners and hundreds of thousands of courses by 2024; Coursera reported more than a hundred million registered users. The self-enrichment teacher who mastered these platforms could earn multiples of the BLS median wage; those who did not were largely unaffected in their in-person studio or community-college roles.

    Effect on the work

    The online course platforms bifurcated the self-enrichment teaching workforce into a high-earnings, high-scale creator layer and a persisting in-person layer with flat wages. Total employment continued growing as the new platform channel created instructor opportunities where none had existed before.

  • Pandemic online pivot: Zoom teaching, live-streaming, hybrid studio (March 2020)

    When COVID-19 forced studio and community college closures beginning in March 2020, self-enrichment teachers faced an abrupt forced migration: in-person yoga classes moved to Zoom, cooking demonstrations to live-streamed Instagram sessions, music lessons to FaceTime and Zoom with latency challenges. The instructors who adapted quickly discovered that the geographic barrier had dissolved not just for asynchronous courses but for live instruction: a yoga teacher in Brooklyn could sustain a global Zoom client base that outlasted the pandemic reopening. Many students who discovered online enrichment classes during 2020 continued attending them after in-person resumed, accelerating the hybrid model. The pandemic compressed what might have been a decade of online adoption into several months.

    Effect on the work

    BLS OEWS data shows that self-enrichment teacher employment dropped during the pandemic year (a portion of studio-based instruction ceased entirely) and recovered as hybrid delivery became standard. The pandemic permanently raised the online share of enrichment teaching and raised the technical floor for instructors: Zoom, screen-sharing, and streaming are now baseline expectations.

  • AI curriculum builders and creator tools (MagicSchool, Kajabi AI, Synthesia, 2023)

    Beginning in 2023, AI-powered teaching tools began materially reducing the overhead cost of running an independent enrichment teaching business. MagicSchool AI, adopted by 5 million educators worldwide by 2026, provides many tools including lesson-plan generators, quiz builders, and rubric creators. Kajabi's AI Course Generator produces a structured course outline from a topic prompt; Synthesia generates polished explainer videos using AI avatars from a typed script, eliminating the need for a camera or video editing skills. For independent enrichment teachers operating as one-person businesses, these tools address the largest non-teaching time sink: content production and marketing. Crucially, the live instruction itself, the core of what students pay for, remains entirely human: no AI system in 2026 can replicate the yoga teacher reading a student's fatigue, the cooking instructor adjusting grip technique in real time, or the music teacher catching an intonation problem by ear.

Part of Education · see all 51 roles →
Different role?

See the same long-arc view for your own profession.

Browse the directory by industry, or search by title or SOC code.

Browse all roles

Self-Enrichment Teachers employment and pay by year

On record since1826
Latest US employment332,110 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$46,800 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+3.5% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 2319)

    Employment, 2022
    54,000, ONS ASHE 2022 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 2319 Teaching professionals n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2022 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2022
    £18,328, ONS ASHE 2022 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 2319 Teaching professionals n.e.c., United Kingdom, 2022. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 2492)

    Employment, 2025
    49,500, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2492 Private Tutors and Teachers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$130,936, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$2,518 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 27 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
183415,000n/aEst., Lyceum movement Researched contextReport
192440,000$1,200Est., Chautauqua Researched contextReport
1970120,000n/aEst., Community Colleges in the United States Researched contextReport
2000230,000$24,000Est., O*NET / BLS Researched contextReport
2003136,680$29,820BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004141,180$30,880BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005141,650$32,360BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006149,700$33,440BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007156,960$34,580BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008163,190$35,720BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009162,330$36,440BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010160,990$36,340BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011169,200$36,100BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012179,650$35,320BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013187,180$35,500BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014202,360$36,020BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015217,530$36,680BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016229,840$37,330BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017238,710$38,440BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018243,080$38,720BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019252,780$39,190BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020222,700$39,960BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021216,910$43,580BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022248,150$44,110BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023272,110$45,330BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024308,520$45,590BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025332,110$46,800BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
Embed this timeline on your site

Free for any site. Paste this where the timeline should appear; it stays interactive, every datapoint stays cited, and it sets no cookies on your page. How embedding works

<iframe src="https://futurehistory.earth/embed/25-3021"
  width="100%" height="430" style="border:0"
  title="Self-Enrichment Teachers, a Future History timeline"
  loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:13px;margin:4px 0 0"><a href="https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-3021">Self-Enrichment Teachers: jobs and pay over time</a>, from Future History</p>

See all roles in Education