A lot of my students seek career advice from me, which falls into the category of Things I Am 0% Qualified To Give Advice About. Somehow I feel if I had good career advice, I'd have a better career myself. LOL. On the other hand, it is a logical conclusion that as a faculty member in biology, I might have insight as to what a person can do with a degree in biology, so I usually pretend like I know something.
Occasionally, my students will ask me what it would take to have my job. I reply that they would have to kill me and assume my identity (which is some cases might involve a sex-change operation). Then they clarify that they don't literally want my job; they just want a job like mine. Then I tell them, Oh no, trust me, you don't. Now, as I've already established, there are a lot of great things about my job - in case you missed it, see 10 Best Things About My Job. However, the thing about being an instructor is that there is no clearly defined path to becoming a full-time instructor.
There is a clearly defined path to becoming a K-12 teacher, and there is a clearly defined path to becoming a professor, but there is no clearly defined path to becoming an instructor. On a side note, contrary to what a lot of students believe, there is practically no overlap between the path to becoming college faculty and the path to becoming a K-12 teacher. I can't tell you how many students I have who tell me they want to teach K-12 for a while, then get a Ph.D. and teach at a college. But that isn't how it usually works; K-12 and college are completely different career paths, just like being a nurse isn't a stepping stone toward becoming a doctor.
So back to my original point. To become a professor, you need to go to graduate school and complete a Ph.D., then you apply for open positions in your field. To be an instructor, you usually need at least a master's degree; however, full-time instructor positions are few and far between and generally pay very poorly, so you'd be a fool to get a master's degree with the sole hope of trying to land a full-time instructorship. Some schools don't even have permanent instructors, instead relying on teaching assistants (current graduate students) and adjuncts to fulfill the roles of instructors. Also, the market is so saturated with Ph.D.s who cannot find tenure-track positions, many are willing to take non-tenure-track positions. This is especially the case when you consider the two-body problem, which is becoming more and more common. The two-body problem refers to the fact that many couples meet in graduate school, oftentimes as part of the same program. When they complete grad school, there are two people in a single household with Ph.D.s, often in the same field or even sub-field, which makes it very unlikely they will both land a tenure-track position in the same geographic area. Oftentimes the "trailing spouse" will take an instructor position, and sometimes instructor positions are even pieced together for the sole purpose of offering them to a spouse (since instructor positions are easier to conjure than tenure-track positions).
Thus, the population of full-time instructors is not a cohesive bunch of folks who all followed the same path to end up where they did. Some full-time instructors are people who were in the right place at the right time and got sort of lucky (like me) and some are people who have a Ph.D. but are resigned, for whatever reason, to not having a tenure-track position. And then there is a transient population of full-time instructors, who are just instructing until they get a better gig. On a related note, I should add that a person with a Ph.D. does not necessarily have an advantage over a person with just a master's degree when applying for an instructor position. On the one hand, some people figure that if you can get a person with a Ph.D. for the price of an instructor, why not go for it? On the other hand, the assumption is that a person with a Ph.D. will keeping looking for a better job, as virtually no one goes through 5+ years of graduate school with the ultimate goal of landing a full-time instructor position. In schools who value keeping faculty long-term, having a Ph.D. can actually be a disadvantage, unless it is known that the person with a Ph.D. is a trailing spouse and therefore likely to stay in the area, or the person is too many years out from completing a Ph.D. and is unlikely to ever get a tenure-track position. (There seems to be an unofficial time limit that says once you've completed your Ph.D., you should get a tenure-track position within a "reasonable" number of years, and every year that goes by past this unofficial time limit, you become less and less competitive in the academic job market.) Speculation about a person's intentions and personal situation are often a topic of intense discussion during the hiring process.
So how did I get here? Students often want to know my story, and I give them the abridged version. I wasn't a biology major in college, but after I graduated from college I decided that I wanted to go to med school. I started to take the prerequisites for medical school, and while medical school never happened for me, for reasons I won't go into here (it's not interesting anyway), I discovered that I really like biology. I went on to grad school in biology, and while I did not enjoy research, I really enjoyed teaching. Then I got this job. And here I am. And while in many ways I'm lucky to be here, it has a been a long and convoluted journey that I would not recommend to even my least favorite students.
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