Everybody should have at least one high-income, high-demand skill. This skill serves as your “bread and butter” and will allow you to live the life you want, long-term.
For the past decade, I’ve watched the habits and lifestyles of both poor people and people that are “well off” pretty closely. Initially, I was looking for the “secret sauce” that separated a lot of my friends and family (the poor group) from the rich people I’ve met. But, to my disappointment – it didn’t exist.
The main difference between the poor people I know and the “rich” people I know can be divided into 2 areas:
- How much they earn
- How much they save
That’s it.
It’s such a boring discovery that it almost sounds too boring to be true. However, after focusing on those 2 areas above – I went from poor to “well off” in about 6 years.
And, a lot of this growth from being poor can be attributed to learning a high-income skill.
I mean, it worked so well for me that any time I go visit family that lives in the ghetto, I visit my friends and start preaching the value of high-income skills as a way to get out of the hood.
So, in this post – I’m going to talk about what I believe are the best high-income skills to learn if you’re trying to change your life.
Table of Contents
Why I Chose These Skills
Before I talk about each skill I recommend, I want to tell you why I chose the skills listed below.
I’m a big believer that knowing “why” is often more important than knowing “what”.
So, in this case – knowing why I chose these skills can be more important than knowing what skills I chose because, once you understand my thought process – you’ll be able to think of skills that might be a better fit for you than the ones I’ve mentioned in this post.
Reason #1
The first reason is pretty obvious – it’s because each skill has the potential to make a big money online and offline.
Reason #2
Flexibility.
Each skill I recommend in this post can be applied to a job or can be used to start a business.
Reason #3
Ease of learning enough to start making money.
This reasoning is massively underrated when people evaluate new skills to learn – especially when they’re considering a new skill for the sake of increasing their income.
Just because a skill can pay big money doesn’t mean you should learn it. And, depending on your age, lifestyle, and day-to-day commitments – you may not have enough time to be able to learn some skills enough to make money from them.
So, choosing skills that have a low barrier to entry (time-wise) between learning and being able to make money is extremely valuable.
The High-Income Skills I Recommend
Alright, now that you know why I chose the skills in this post – let’s actually talk about the skills.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the high-income skill I chose to learn the one that helped changed my life.
I’ve been a digital marketer for over a decade and I can confidently tell you that getting into digital marketing will set you up for long-term success.
Marketing is always needed. The level of demand may change depending on the economy and factors outside of your control but big companies almost never stop marketing themselves.
Now, with that said, digital marketing is a big field that lumps a bunch of specialized fields together. And I wouldn’t recommend trying to learn all things digital marketing – it would slow down how quickly you can start making money.
What I recommend is that you pick a specialized area of digital marketing to focus on and get decent at that first before learning other areas of digital marketing.
Here are a few specialized skills to choose from for digital marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Advertising (Google Ads & Facebook Ads are the most popular)
- Email Marketing
There are a lot more specialized skills that fit under the “digital marketing” umbrella. However, the 3 skills that I mentioned above are what I recommend for anyone looking to get into digital marketing.
And, out of those 3 skills, I believe learning how to do paid advertising is the quickest and easiest for making money at the moment.
Website Development
Website development, specifically WordPress development, is not only a high-income skill but it’s also a good way to build a more advanced skill (coding) that allows you to make many different websites.
But, if you focus solely on WordPress development in the beginning – you can learn a lot of what’s necessary within a couple of months. Maybe spend another month building a few different websites that you can add to a portfolio and then you’re good to go.
Depending on your area, you may have enough qualifications to go get an entry-level website development job.
And, if you’re not interested in getting a job and prefer to work for yourself – you can spend another month or two offering your services for free while networking and getting real experience under your belt.
Trade Skills
When I mention “trade skills”, I don’t mean stock trading or anything financial. I’m talking about good ol’ blue-collar work. For example:
- Plumbing
- Electrical
- Carpentry
- Concrete
- Landscaping
- Roofing
- Painting
- Etc…
Trade skills are, in my opinion, one of the best skills to learn at the moment in America due to the demand being high while we’re simultaneously experiencing a labor shortage.
If you decide to go down the trade skills path – you can probably get a low-paying job assisting/helping a company or contractor without much experience at all. You’ll be both learning and getting paid at the same time.
You also have the ability to learn on your own and then start offering your services to homeowners for as cheap as possible while building your name/brand and portfolio.
With that said, going down the path of the trades is primarily an offline endeavor. Meaning, most of the work you do is not done on a computer. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t make money online.
There are plenty of YouTube channels and online businesses surrounding people who work in the trades. From simply showing a day in the life of a tradesman to creating educational material for other aspiring tradesmen – the opportunity is there.
But, there’s a catch. As someone who has been managing rental property for years and is currently a landlord – I can tell you that doing physical labor is rough on your body. It’s not a sustainable long-term career for most people. However, if you put in the time to build the skill, start your own business, and build an online following / extension to your business – you will change your life and be able to hopefully transition out of doing physical work before your body forces you to stop.
Final Thoughts
Like I said at the beginning of this post, everybody should have at least one high-paying skill.
The skills I mentioned above are what I recommend. It’s not meant to be an all-encompassing list of the best high-income skills to learn. There are many more high-paying skills in the world that you can go after.
And, if you notice, I didn’t mention any soft skills or other high-income skills like sales or software development.
Sales skills are one of the most important skills to have in life but it’s not a skill that I would rely on, by itself, to change my life. However, if you bundle sales skills with one of the high-paying skills I mentioned above – you can do some amazing things relatively quickly.
But anyway, If you want to change your life – I’d recommend learning one of the skills I mentioned in this post.
If you focus on one skill seriously, you can change your life relatively quickly.
Recommended Reading: Keep Testing Your Limits
