BetterLearningBetterEarning™ | Get Better Work & Income - Teach Yourself Higher Paying Skills

You probably realize that to get a better job and income, you’ve got to learn new skills. But you can’t afford to quit your job to devote time to education, can you? How can you maintain your full time employment and still learn things to advance your career? You can do both at the same time!

Receiving a degree doesn’t mean you’ve received an education. While a degree’s essential for some professions, the paper means little or nothing for other careers. How can you succeed and make good money without a degree? Well, you still have to get an education; just get it somewhere else.

When I finished college and moved to Denver, I thought I’d have a great job within a few weeks. I had solid work experience accrued throughout my college years and a respectable, non-technical degree in my pocket. But those two weeks turned into four full months before I landed my first job in the training industry.

Those four months without work took a terrible toll. I didn’t sleep soundly for more than a few hours each night. Stress and worry tear down immunity quickly. I got so sick with the flu I think I might have died. The few thousand dollars we had saved quickly evaporated and my wife was pregnant with our first child – no health insurance!

Do you get inspired to see other people who’ve found their “thing” and developed true expertise? Rachel Clare is a family friend who we’ve watched refine her photography skills from good to great over the last few years. Now she’s making bank and a name for herself. She took the time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about how she learned these moneymaking skills.

The three topic options for a term paper in my freshman philosophy class didn’t interest me at all. I looked over the requirements for our term papers – we wrote four over the course of the semester – and thought that it doesn’t explicitly say I had to write on the assigned topics to get an A grade. Knowing that the paper with the lowest grade got dropped from the calculation for our final course grade, I took a risk. I wrote a paper in flawless logic proving that, “Students in Philosophy 110 don’t have to write on the assigned topics in order to get an A on their term papers.”

I work at a large company’s headquarters in the HR department and sit right next to our corporate (and executive) recruiters. What I’ve learned about how jobs are actually awarded conflicts with what many job coaches advise people to do. Of course, this is how it happens at one big company, but I’ve also gleaned some myth-debunking information from working for an even larger company before this one.

When was the last time you were “forced” to learn something? Did you have to attend a training session for your job? Have to complete an online course for school? Required to complete job hunting workshops to maintain unemployment benefits? The fact is we don’t learn very well when we feel the “education” is against our wills. Pink Floyd phrased the sentiment well when they sang, “We don’t need no education…we don’t need no mind control!” The more liberated you feel, the better you’ll learn.

Has the fad of blogging died out yet? I – like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net – hate the term itself. Sounds like some bodily indiscretion: “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go blog.” However, publishing through the Internet offers great opportunities to improve several important abilities. You’ll sharpen your marketable skills, make some new friends, and possibly bring in some extra money as you start sharing your ideas through blogging.