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- Oct 9, 2012
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This is the sister post to my other post on making money, "How Can I Make Money Right Now?" That one was focused on a short-term get-paid-now objective; this one is focused on the long view. What can you do to position yourself to be pulling in not-inconsiderable income in the not-too-distant future?
If you'd like to narrow down what career, trade, or skill to pursue to enable yourself to rake in some cash, read on.
HOW TO SELECT A CAREER, TRADE, OR SKILL
Your main considerations in selecting a trade, skill, or career should be:
For instance, right now there's an oil boom going on in the U.S. Midwest. You can go work in an oil boom town and be making $120K / year with no college degree. A few years back anybody and his brother could head out there and fairly reliably get a job. Sounds like a dream, right?
These days, the spots are mostly filled and it's become extremely difficult to get hired for most of these positions. Even if you did manage to get hired, the work is extremely demanding, and you'll be on-location for large chunks of the year, and not in a fun town with parties and pretty girls. Working in the oil industry means you're either on a rig out in the ocean or you're out in the middle of nowhere in a town with a 10:1 male:female ratio, where the only women present are the girlfriends and wives of your coworkers. And you probably won't want to be trying to pick up them.
It's important to research the skill, trade, or career you're interested in before you start devoting lots of time to it, and by 'research' I mean listen to what people who actually work in that area have to say about it. If they say it's all roses, look for the catch. There usually is one.
IMPORTANT NOTE: don't go thinking a college education is an automatic ticket to employment heaven. It's not. Prior to the 1970s, businesses would use tools like IQ tests to sift for the right candidates, until IQ testing by prospective employers was outlawed. Since they couldn't use IQ tests, employers shifted to college degrees instead. This created a huge, crazy, colossal degree rush, where suddenly everyone and his brother attended university, which led to a glut of no-name universities stuffed with under-qualified teachers pushing rubbish courses.
Unless you have a technical degree (e.g., a STEM degree) or you went to a big-name university... and perhaps unless you have a STEM degree and went to a big-name university... your degree won't help you much. It's a minimum requirement at this point, rather than a real asset of any kind. It's the career equivalent of being nice; it's great that you're nice (or have a degree), but you're going to have to show a lot more than that if you want the girl (the job).
Whatever degree you pursue in university, unless you are independently wealthy, I advise you to choose something that will position you to be an attractive choice to employers after graduation. That means something in STEM. The 'easy' majors (psychology, English, liberal arts, etc.) I advise you only to select if you're independently wealth and don't need a job, or you're just attending college for kicks. Everyone else, pick something people will actually pay you for.
WHAT OPTIONS ARE GOOD IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY?
Okay, so, the meat of this post, and what you're probably looking for: recommendations.
You have three options:
If you intend to work for a company, you're after a career. If you want to be a tradesman, you need to learn a trade. If you want to freelance or be an entrepreneur, you need to learn some kind of skill that is in-demand and there exist people who want to pay you enough money that you'll be happy with it.
IF YOU WANT TO WORK FOR A COMPANY
You need a university degree. Bachelor's degrees today are the high school diplomas of a half a century ago; they're the minimum requirement for entry to most big corporations. That's because big corporations need dependable workers who will fit into their system and not rock the boat, and if you couldn't make it through university they will tend to take that as a sign that you are too unstable or come from too chaotic a background to be a fit in their world of gray cubicles, Excel spreadsheets, fake office plants, and dim interior lighting.
WHAT your degree is in and WHERE you got it from are IMPORTANT. The more prestigious the company you want to work for and the higher base pay you want to start out at, the more these two things matter. Attend the best school you can, and make sure you choose the major that gets you the career you want. If you chose whatever during university, as a lot of folks do because no one really gives you any guidance or a taste of reality before you enter the university system, and you now find yourself looking for a job and realizing no one's hiring someone with a degree in "Gender Politics of the Ottoman Empire", you may want to consider heading back to school and grabbing a Master's in something a little more practical. Study hard for the GMATs, retake them if necessary, write an impressive application, and get into the best school you can get into, too.
You can search for any kind of job (accountant, IT manager, HR director, what have you) and see pay ranges here:
Salary Data & Career Research Center (United States)
IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A TRADE
... then you will need to attend trade school.
Many trades (like plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc.) have roughly the same annual income as corporate careers - e.g., electricians tend to be better paid than accountants, for instance.
Trades are a good option if you're not much of a numbers / office guy; they're respectable, manly occupations that let you work with your hands. Most trade schools only take up two years of your time, not four like universities, making them a more time-efficient option as well.
You can find salary data for the various trades on the same site as careers, above:
Salary Data & Career Research Center (United States)
IF YOU WANT TO FREELANCE / BE AN ENTREPRENEUR
... then you need to learn a skill.
Probably MULTIPLE skills, if running a business is your aim.
You will likely need to self-teach to a large degree. e.g., if you want to be a programmer, you can probably teach yourself in a week most of what they'd teach you in any given semester of a computer sciences class in a university (unless you have a spectacular instructor). This means you will have to seek out resources to enable yourself to learn whatever it is you want to learn how to do.
Fortunately, there are tons of resources for learning online, and many of them are cheap, or even free.
If you want to learn computer programming:
If you want to learn something else:
As far as skill sets are concerned, three I'd recommend pursuing with solid income now and well into the future include:
Programming and copywriting you can spend a reasonable amount of time learning and then start freelancing for on a site like UpWork to build up experience and get paid while you do it. Digital marketing will be a little trickier, since you'll usually have to start off investing your own cash up front, and may lose quite a bit before you start seeing returns. It can also be a boom-and-bust cycle: there are lots of success stories in the digital marketing world of guys who make $300K in a year, then their offer falls apart, they blow all the money, and then they're back living in their mom's basement again trying to figure out another angle on making money again and racking up credit card debt trying different things out and failing.
If you're interested in programming, I suggest you read up on the different languages involved before you commit to learning one:
If you're unsure, PHP is a good solid language I hear in constantly high demand that the folks on Hacker News complain about recruiters on LinkedIn hounding them constantly trying to throw jobs at them over. Rails and Python are other popular choices, especially if you're thinking about building web apps or running your own Internet business at some point.
Any of these will give you a sound background on which to build a business though - if you become a capable programmer, copywriter, or digital marketer, you'll have no problem coming up with and monetizing business ideas, nor with finding founders. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I recommend you start following Hacker News and get familiar with the scene there:
THIS SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF WORK. HOW DO I GET PAID NOW?
Go here:
How Can I Make Money Right Now?
To your success,
Chase
If you'd like to narrow down what career, trade, or skill to pursue to enable yourself to rake in some cash, read on.
HOW TO SELECT A CAREER, TRADE, OR SKILL
Your main considerations in selecting a trade, skill, or career should be:
- Is this something that interests me?
- Is this something I think it would be COOL to be really good at?
- Is the income potential of this opportunity satisfactory for me?
- Is the lifestyle of people who are successful in this area a lifestyle I'd like to share?
- Are there opportunities in this niche in my area? If not, where are the opportunities?
- How easy or hard is it to find work in this niche right now, and what does the job market in it look like 5 or 10 years out?
For instance, right now there's an oil boom going on in the U.S. Midwest. You can go work in an oil boom town and be making $120K / year with no college degree. A few years back anybody and his brother could head out there and fairly reliably get a job. Sounds like a dream, right?
These days, the spots are mostly filled and it's become extremely difficult to get hired for most of these positions. Even if you did manage to get hired, the work is extremely demanding, and you'll be on-location for large chunks of the year, and not in a fun town with parties and pretty girls. Working in the oil industry means you're either on a rig out in the ocean or you're out in the middle of nowhere in a town with a 10:1 male:female ratio, where the only women present are the girlfriends and wives of your coworkers. And you probably won't want to be trying to pick up them.
It's important to research the skill, trade, or career you're interested in before you start devoting lots of time to it, and by 'research' I mean listen to what people who actually work in that area have to say about it. If they say it's all roses, look for the catch. There usually is one.
IMPORTANT NOTE: don't go thinking a college education is an automatic ticket to employment heaven. It's not. Prior to the 1970s, businesses would use tools like IQ tests to sift for the right candidates, until IQ testing by prospective employers was outlawed. Since they couldn't use IQ tests, employers shifted to college degrees instead. This created a huge, crazy, colossal degree rush, where suddenly everyone and his brother attended university, which led to a glut of no-name universities stuffed with under-qualified teachers pushing rubbish courses.
Unless you have a technical degree (e.g., a STEM degree) or you went to a big-name university... and perhaps unless you have a STEM degree and went to a big-name university... your degree won't help you much. It's a minimum requirement at this point, rather than a real asset of any kind. It's the career equivalent of being nice; it's great that you're nice (or have a degree), but you're going to have to show a lot more than that if you want the girl (the job).
Whatever degree you pursue in university, unless you are independently wealthy, I advise you to choose something that will position you to be an attractive choice to employers after graduation. That means something in STEM. The 'easy' majors (psychology, English, liberal arts, etc.) I advise you only to select if you're independently wealth and don't need a job, or you're just attending college for kicks. Everyone else, pick something people will actually pay you for.
WHAT OPTIONS ARE GOOD IN THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY?
Okay, so, the meat of this post, and what you're probably looking for: recommendations.
You have three options:
- Work for a company
- Become a tradesman
- Freelance or be an entrepreneur
If you intend to work for a company, you're after a career. If you want to be a tradesman, you need to learn a trade. If you want to freelance or be an entrepreneur, you need to learn some kind of skill that is in-demand and there exist people who want to pay you enough money that you'll be happy with it.
IF YOU WANT TO WORK FOR A COMPANY
You need a university degree. Bachelor's degrees today are the high school diplomas of a half a century ago; they're the minimum requirement for entry to most big corporations. That's because big corporations need dependable workers who will fit into their system and not rock the boat, and if you couldn't make it through university they will tend to take that as a sign that you are too unstable or come from too chaotic a background to be a fit in their world of gray cubicles, Excel spreadsheets, fake office plants, and dim interior lighting.
WHAT your degree is in and WHERE you got it from are IMPORTANT. The more prestigious the company you want to work for and the higher base pay you want to start out at, the more these two things matter. Attend the best school you can, and make sure you choose the major that gets you the career you want. If you chose whatever during university, as a lot of folks do because no one really gives you any guidance or a taste of reality before you enter the university system, and you now find yourself looking for a job and realizing no one's hiring someone with a degree in "Gender Politics of the Ottoman Empire", you may want to consider heading back to school and grabbing a Master's in something a little more practical. Study hard for the GMATs, retake them if necessary, write an impressive application, and get into the best school you can get into, too.
You can search for any kind of job (accountant, IT manager, HR director, what have you) and see pay ranges here:
Salary Data & Career Research Center (United States)
IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A TRADE
... then you will need to attend trade school.
Many trades (like plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc.) have roughly the same annual income as corporate careers - e.g., electricians tend to be better paid than accountants, for instance.
Trades are a good option if you're not much of a numbers / office guy; they're respectable, manly occupations that let you work with your hands. Most trade schools only take up two years of your time, not four like universities, making them a more time-efficient option as well.
You can find salary data for the various trades on the same site as careers, above:
Salary Data & Career Research Center (United States)
IF YOU WANT TO FREELANCE / BE AN ENTREPRENEUR
... then you need to learn a skill.
Probably MULTIPLE skills, if running a business is your aim.
You will likely need to self-teach to a large degree. e.g., if you want to be a programmer, you can probably teach yourself in a week most of what they'd teach you in any given semester of a computer sciences class in a university (unless you have a spectacular instructor). This means you will have to seek out resources to enable yourself to learn whatever it is you want to learn how to do.
Fortunately, there are tons of resources for learning online, and many of them are cheap, or even free.
If you want to learn computer programming:
- Go to Code Academy (it's free)
If you want to learn something else:
- Check out Udemy - there are inexpensive courses on EVERYTHING on there
As far as skill sets are concerned, three I'd recommend pursuing with solid income now and well into the future include:
- Programming
- Copywriting
- Digital marketing (affiliate marketing, social media marketing, media buying, etc.)
Programming and copywriting you can spend a reasonable amount of time learning and then start freelancing for on a site like UpWork to build up experience and get paid while you do it. Digital marketing will be a little trickier, since you'll usually have to start off investing your own cash up front, and may lose quite a bit before you start seeing returns. It can also be a boom-and-bust cycle: there are lots of success stories in the digital marketing world of guys who make $300K in a year, then their offer falls apart, they blow all the money, and then they're back living in their mom's basement again trying to figure out another angle on making money again and racking up credit card debt trying different things out and failing.
If you're interested in programming, I suggest you read up on the different languages involved before you commit to learning one:
- RANKED: The Highest-Paying Programming Languages
- 14 Best Programming Languages Based on Earnings & Opportunities
If you're unsure, PHP is a good solid language I hear in constantly high demand that the folks on Hacker News complain about recruiters on LinkedIn hounding them constantly trying to throw jobs at them over. Rails and Python are other popular choices, especially if you're thinking about building web apps or running your own Internet business at some point.
Any of these will give you a sound background on which to build a business though - if you become a capable programmer, copywriter, or digital marketer, you'll have no problem coming up with and monetizing business ideas, nor with finding founders. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I recommend you start following Hacker News and get familiar with the scene there:
THIS SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF WORK. HOW DO I GET PAID NOW?
Go here:
How Can I Make Money Right Now?
To your success,
Chase
