By this point, you have likely said to yourself, “This is all good, but how do I afford it?” The good news is that you are in an excellent position to get paid while you advance your knowledge and career. In fact, learning new tools while building real-world experience is a common trait among the best developers I have met. We will explore the details of how to fund your learning in more depth in future posts. For now, let’s just start the wheels moving with things you can do.
It Takes Skills To Learn Skills
When you are starting out, it can be easy to underestimate the value of the skills you already have. Once you have a degree, you will have had training that can get you started on side hustle work. This can be in the form of consulting and for-hire work or creating applications and services. Although you can spend hours working on your skills and advancing your career without the distraction of a client or goal, it is worthwhile to earn as you go.
We have looked at some options for earning as you go when we looked at the various ways to make a living with this skills. Our focus then was on the ability to learn skills based on our desires and goals. At this time, we will explore how to go about finding ways to add revenue to our learning or at least get it paid for.
As we discussed earlier, we have two primary paths available. Revenue can come from services or products. Each option has pros and cons as well as requiring us to do some work we may not enjoy. The good news is that taking either path will get us out of our comfort zone and contribute to our desire to become a better developer.
Keep The Big Picture In Mind
There is a value in creating a product or providing a service when our primary goal is learning new skills. Our primary goal is not earning money. Therefore, we can effectively undersell the competition and offer our products to customers that otherwise might be priced out of the market. There is a danger in this as the support of those customers can become a cost. However, when we avoid offering much (or any) support then we can keep our overall investment low and focused on product creation.
The same benefit arises when you look at offering a service. You can keep your hourly rate low or allow for payment only on completion of work. This is not a guarantee of winning a project. Also, you should always be truthful with a customer about your desire to use the project for learning. On the other hand, there are some projects that are tailor-made for a learner. I have personally won a few of these sort of projects over the years. They were both fun and educational in many ways..
