In the past several months, more people have embraced learning as a productive, rewarding way to enrich their time and their overall lives. With the pandemic in full swing across the globe, online education has become the pillar of self-care, professional as well as personal growth, and a way to restore one’s livelihood for those who have lost their job. As challenging as it is to keep learning during such a stressful period in our lives, it’s also one of those activities that remind us of the possibility for a better tomorrow.
If you already have a few handy skills and perhaps a degree or higher education in a specific field, you know the value of learning. However, you might find yourself wondering what you should focus on, because on one hand, you don’t want to waste precious time on outdated knowledge, and on the other hand, you’d like to invest in something that can be lucrative.
This year is particularly unique in that respect: the remote nature of our interactions has made certain skills more relevant than others. Here are a few you should develop over time to make yourself a stronger candidate for an employer, or to make your own business even more self-reliant than ever before.
Social Media Management
Whether you’re a freelancer, a business owner, or in search of a new career, few things are as “hot” right now as social media. People are now interacting with brands and influencers through these versatile networks, and they have become the main playground for building customer relationships, providing customer service, and ensuring customer engagement.
You can apply these skills in social media management to promoting your own company or freelance services, or you can use them to work for a client or as an employee handling social accounts for a brand. In either scenario, your social media management skills will become pivotal for your professional growth.
Photography and Editing
As you’ll shortly see, content is the lifeblood of businesses online, but content certainly doesn’t start or end with the written word. If you have the right equipment at your disposal and enough time on your hands, you can become a photographer and build a portfolio of wonderful images that can be sold via stock image sites, or that you can directly sell to brands of all kinds.
The beauty of this work is that it’s versatile and it lets you collaborate with individuals as well as entire organizations. You also have creative freedom to develop your unique style, which means your work can become an authentic expression of your view of the world.
Web Development and Design
With the surge of remote work due to the pandemic and the necessity to protect businesses with superior IT skills, companies today need to have strong IT infrastructures, well-designed websites, as well as strong cybersecurity strategies. In that sense, you can take your pick from a wide array of online IT courses to enrich your portfolio with the latest web development, web design, and even cybersecurity skills.
You can use those skills to become a far more proficient employee candidate for any business, or you can use them to reinforce your own business presence online. Creating stellar websites, providing IT maintenance, as well as ensuring cybersecurity are all essential in the modern world that relies on technology every day, and it’s up to you to find your forte and develop new IT skills.
Content Creation
Storytelling is the very core of modern-day branding. It’s essential for small businesses as well as individuals and large-scale corporations, and it’s what makes any digital business stand out and become relevant in the SERPs.
By learning to create powerful content, you’ll become a top asset in the eyes of every business out there. Whether you’d like to work as a content creator as a part of an organization, or a digital agency to provide stellar content to a multitude of clients, content will never really become redundant.
Mastering a New Language
Teaching is one of the most rewarding careers one can embrace, and in recent years, especially due to overwhelming globalization and digitalization, people are eager to learn new languages. It provides a lifeline to a new culture, and a special window into the life of the native people. If you’d ever like to become a teacher, being a language teacher is a lucrative online career that can help you either introduce a new income stream or completely transform your professional path.
For the time being, you can start learning a language with the help of a useful app, and then improve by interacting with native speakers of that language on social media. Alternatively, knowing a new language will help you reach out to new markets in providing your existing services, be it social media marketing, content writing, or web development.
Although we’re all looking forward to the end of 2020, we might as well make the most of the remaining time and use it to greet 2021 with a stronger set of skills. These skills can become your new source of income, an entire career path, or they can help you strengthen your professional impact in your current position. You can run your own business or be a freelancer, but these are the skills that are certain to have a high ROI, so make sure to invest in them this year.
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