Universities of Netherlands: Chief Classroom Officer

KesselsKramer gives teachers the status they deserve: by upgrading their job titles

Job titles are inherently linked to status. But people often tend to inflate or enhance their titles to make themselves seem more important. After all, doesn’t everyone want to be a ‘Chief Something Officer’ on LinkedIn?

But teaching - a job that is genuinely important - hasn’t always benefited from this trend. That is, until now. KesselsKramer’s campaign for the Dutch organisation, The Universities of the Netherlands aims to change this by making a bold statement about the value of teaching. But done, in classic KesselsKramer style, with a wink. The campaign applies status-enhancing job titles to teaching to demonstrate that teachers deserve more recognition and respect.

As an academically trained teacher, you are already (according to the Professional Profile of the Academic Teacher by the Universities of the Netherlands) an expert and specialist, a leader, impact-maker, educational developer, researcher, and mentor. Yet the title ‘teacher’ doesn’t necessarily reflect this. The new campaign invites teachers to adopt new job titles, such as curriculum consultant, chief classroom officer, impact facilitator, growth developer, research coach, and managing mentor to highlight the fact that every academic teacher embodies all of these roles, and much more. These new job titles are ironically signed off with ‘a.k.a. Teacher’.

Tristan Roques, art director KesselsKramer: “With this campaign we want to motivate people to become teachers, but we also want to make a statement: what kind of jobs do we value as a society? In our industry we can give ourselves job titles such as art director, creative director, account manager, so why can't we do the same in education?”

The campaign coincides with World Teacher’s Day, which this year takes place on Monday, October 6 and teachers are encouraged to temporarily change their LinkedIn job titles to one of the new, more expansive titles. This playful campaign will then be rolled out through the universities’ own channels and includes classic corporate swag items such as mugs, sweaters, badges, and stickers, all featuring the new, status-enhancing titles.

This initiative builds on KesselsKramer’s highly successful Do Something that Matters campaign from last year which led to a remarkable almost 11% increase in enrollments for university teacher training programs.