How to learn the skills to pay the bills

Hello avatards, welcome back!

A few days ago, I left off talking about finding what you think you want to do. Today, I’m going out with some pointers on where you can learn these skills.

My criteria are that it must be free or inexpensive and materially relevant to the skill you’re trying to learn. If it doesn’t translate immediately to dinero, it doesn’t matter.

Check your local library

If you think it’s hard to find a good way to learn relevant skills on the cheap, then you either don’t know, are seriously ignorant, or worse.

The basic public library of a medium-sized city or any college is way underutilized. For instance, my library offers free access to a whole bunch of learning programs although only two of them have a whole to offer for entrepreneurial skills.

One of the programs is the well-known LinkedIn Learning, which has thousands of individual courses covering all kinds of topics. But more interestingly, LI Learning has learning paths that aggregate similar courses for a comprehensive learning path. Some learning paths are ten hours long, while others are much longer.

You can also just search for a skill and see what it comes up with. This is for free, so there is no downside. Worst case, you learn something that helps you with your current career path. Maybe you secure a raise from it.

Or, you stick with it for a while and you learn it well enough to start landing some traffic as a freelancer/independent contractor. Eventually, you do what I did and chase after it full-time.

One last thing: if you are a veteran of the U.S. military, you can get free access to LinkedIn Premium every year. LinkedIn Learning is complementary to Premium membership, so you will have access to it.

Treehouse Learning

The next service (and I am not saying your library has these, but mine does) is Treehouse Learning. It is very similar to LI Learning, but frankly, I think it is better. I have done some HTML and CSS learning on it, as has my 20-year-old human resource.

It is a high-quality service, and if you can get it for free, you can definitely gain valuable knowledge for your future.

These are just a couple of examples of what’s on there for learning paths. They are highly detailed and extensive. There are dozens upon dozens of options for you to choose from, so pick the ones that align with your goals and get going. In a year, you can definitely knock out 200+ hours of learning, which will put you head and shoulders above most of the crowd.

Look, this is not exhaustive. This is actually just scratching the surface. But you can get a lot of high-quality learning lined up and knocked out for free. This isn’t hard. Just pick a skill that pays well, then go over to the free services that your library probably offers, enroll in some courses, and start learning. In 6-12 months, you will be competent enough to start getting gigs and then just keep on learning and earning.

That’s it.

Don’t overcomplicate it.