I spent ten years instructing in GA before landing a gig with the majors. In between I did a tiny bit of charter & some search-&-rescue flying, but I would hazard a guess that instructing constituted almost 90 percent of my GA flying. Some things I pondered along the way...
- I never intended to be a career instructor, but was a relatively late starter (married with two kids & another to come later), & as much as I would have loved to do the "up-north" rite of passage, for various family reasons we were committed to staying in the big city - so it was instructing or nothing.
- During my ten year stint, I regularly heard people say that "you shouldn't instruct unless you really want to be an instructor", or "those that can, do, & those that can't, teach", or "instructors are useless to anyone outside of instructing", or "you'll never get into the airlines unless you grow some big brass ones & head north/get into some charter flying", etc, etc. After a few years it became very tiring to hear the same stuff over & over, & towards the end of my time as an instructor I must confess I was getting well & truly fed up with playing babysitter to the guy/girl sitting next to me - instead of just getting on the with the job of flying an aeroplane myself - but having said that, I never short-changed my students & always made sure they got the best I had to offer.
- If I had to go back to GA instructing tomorrow, I would most likely pull the pin on flying - period. Over ten years it all but sucked the life out of me, & in the end I couldn't wait to get the hell out of it. Not just instructing, but GA in general. Nevertheless I still believe teaching of any kind to be a noble profession for those who commit to it as a long term career path. I was lucky that I got to do a lot of what I call "quality" instructing, i.e. multi-IFR/airline cadet & the like, as opposed to just bashing around the circuit for thousands of hours in a C152. In this regard, I think I developed skills that placed me well for a career with the airlines, as I was already familiar with multi-crew concepts & adherence to airline orientated SOP's (unlike the circuit bashers & guys flying single-pilot charter).
I'm not going to get into the old instructing vs charter debate, except to say that I eventually got to where I wanted to be - & coming from an instructing background never hindered my career anywhere near as much as many people thought it would. Granted, I took a bit longer to get there than I would have preferred, but again that was for personal reasons, not because of being an instructor.
Whatever works for you...