Sitting down with a friend one day, he was telling me about how crummy a week he’d been having.
Moving along past the part where he curses and calls his boss and colleagues all kinds of names which I will not reiterate here, he tells me he wished he could freelance if only he had some skills.
“Skills?”, I asked feeling abit confused.
“Yeah…skills, you know like web design, programming and all that stuff. I don’t know how to do any of that stuff.”
Here I was staring at a man who had spent 4 years in university and a couple more years working in an engineering firm, and he was telling me he didn’t have any skills.
“Can you read and write?”, I asked.
“Sure”, he answers.
“Can you speak a language fluently? Can you count? Can you use a computer, check email and web surf?”, I continued.
“Uhuh”, he responds.
A look of confusion begins to appear on his face. “So what?” he says, “Anyone with a brain knows how to do all that stuff”
Turning my laptop towards him, I’d done a very quick search online and showed him an article I had found just minutes before.
Parts of it read something like this:
“…Statistics released by the U.S. Education Department show that some 32 million U.S. adults lack basic prose literacy skill. That means they can’t read a newspaper or the instruction on a bottle of pills….”
“…A large number of the unemployed are low-skilled individuals who struggle with everyday reading, writing and math tasks…”
Literacy is a freelance skill
Even if you don’t know web design or programming or don’t believe you have what it takes to be a travel writer, there are heaps of people out there (especially online business owners) who are looking for people who can read, write and speak good (insert your native language here) to help them with running their business’s.
More and more people are getting jobs as Virtual Assistants or Virtual Admins whereby they are paid to carry out the busy work of people’s businesses.
In many cases, these people don’t expect you to have any prior skills or knowledge and will teach you how to do the activities they want you to carry out.
People who get targeted for these jobs are generally people who have good literacy in the employers desired language and are able to use a computer and learn new software easily.
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Even if becoming a virtual assistant isn’t your thing, learning new freelance skills is 10 times easier compared to if you couldn’t read or write.
These days, people can teach themselves web design by referring to books or online tutorials.
Others learn to travel write by reading other travel blogs then giving it a shot themselves.
Imagine if you wanted to freelance online but you didn’t know what the internet was or even how to turn on a computer.
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80% of all freelance skills out there can be self taught without spending heaps of money.
You only need to be able to read in order to gain access to the information that most of the time is publicly available in libraries, websites, forums and blogs.
This was how I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator in order to work on an early freelance project and how i’ve acquired additional freelance skills since.
Online training resources for increasing freelance skills
While there are definitely heaps of free resources out there, there are quite a few websites that specialize in selling video training tutorials designed to speed up your learning process.
Here in this post I will give you both so you know where to go if you ever want to learn more than what the free tutorials can give you.
Adobe Design Center Video Workshop
One of the best places I’ve found online to get started learning how to use Adobe products. They have heaps of free video tutorials run by certified Adobe Trainers.
Another great place with heaps of not only Adobe video tutorials is Creative Cow.net. Here they have an extended list of video tutorials that include Autodesk and Apple software.
Probably the most extensive Online Training Library on the web, Lynda.com boasts a database of 700 self paced training courses and over 43,900 training videos which continues to grow on a monthly basis.
While many of these tutorials are free, most of them are locked behind a subscription payment to their site.
I would hold off paying any money until you’ve gone through all the free tutorials relating to what you want to learn on all these sites.
It is usually enough to get you started and once you’ve got a foot into using the software, you’ll start to get a hang of using the software on your own.
Some final advice to help supercharge your learning process
Another good idea is to find a friend or just anyone you know who might have some experience with the software or skill you want to learn.
Spending even a few minutes talking to a person who has experience in the freelance field you want to enter could potentially save you months of trial and error and help you supercharge your learning by pointing you immediately in the right direction.
Use the experience of others to your advantage and take advantage of free resources to learn and gain experience cheaply while you are just starting out.
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
