Choosing a Skill That Pays: A Student's Guide

The advice a student gets about skills comes in two flavours and both are wrong on their own. Follow your passion, which ignores whether anyone will pay. Follow the market, which ignores whether you will still be doing it in three years. The useful answer sits between them and it is more specific than either.

Three questions, in this order

• Does someone already pay for this? Not in theory. Can you find ten people currently being paid for it, with a number attached?
• Can you get to useful in twelve months? Not expert. Useful enough that a first client is not being done a favour.
• Can you tolerate the boring middle of it? Every skill has one and it is where most people quit.

A skill that fails the first question is a hobby, which is a fine thing to have and a poor thing to plan on. A skill that fails the second will be abandoned before it earns anything. A skill that fails the third will be abandoned right after it starts to.

Prefer skills that compound

Some skills are worth roughly the same in year five as in year one, because the work does not accumulate. Others compound: every project makes the next one better paid, because judgement, portfolio and reputation all stack on top of each other.

Writing, selling, design, analysis, building software and understanding money all compound, which is why people who are good at them at forty are paid several times what they were at twenty-five for the same hours. Prefer those. They are also, not coincidentally, the ones that survive a change in tools.

Test it cheaply before you commit

You cannot decide this by reading. Give a candidate skill thirty days and a real deliverable, not a course completion certificate: a landing page, a written piece, a small analysis, ten cold conversations. Thirty days is long enough to reach the boring middle and short enough that being wrong costs you a month.

• Make one real thing, for one real person, ideally for money, however little.
• Notice whether you were curious on day twenty-two or just dutiful.
• Show it to someone who does the work professionally and ask what is missing.
• Then decide. Two more test cycles is a year and a year is affordable at nineteen.

The first rupee is the whole point

Getting paid, even five hundred rupees, changes the relationship. It converts a subject into a skill and it tells you something no grade can: that someone outside your family, with a choice, decided your work was worth money. Everything after that is a question of scale.