6 Incredibly Profitable Skills Anyone Can Learn For Free in 2018

You have to learn to earn.

Published in

The Startup

4 min readMar 20, 2018

Whenever I meet someone who’s in a rut with their career, I’m always fascinated by the ones who are actively developing new skills to break into a different industry — and with the power of the internet, doing so has never been easier.

That being said, not all skills are created equally. Some are much more profitable than others on average. Here are the top 7 that I’d consider if I were ready to do something completely different in 2018.

Programming with Python

Programming is normally at the top of every list like this due to how easy it is to learn to program online (programming itself is still difficult, but there’s so many resources for new learners) and the high earning potential.

Python is widely used in IoT devices, and many machine learning applications — and both fields are seeing immense growth right now, with programmers heavily in demand.

Codecademy has a great free primer on Python that’s geared towards beginners.

Copywriting

Good writing is one thing that’s very far out from being replaced by automation, and a great skill to have in general.

Whether you’re writing content for a company blog or the content they’re putting in their brochures, good copywriters are always in demand. As an added bonus, once you know some basic SEO you can offer to optimize your blog articles for a premium.

Lynda has a great course on content marketing that gets into writing marketing copy, and it’s free if you have a library card in most places.

3D Modeling

With the growth of augmented and virtual reality comes an increase in demand for people who can create experiences for these new mediums.

The average salary for a 3D Modeler in the US is $65,000. I’d expect this to rise over the next decade.

While it’s not a truly free resource, Udemy does have a great course on using Blender that you can normally get for between $12 an $20.

Translation

More and more companies are looking to launch multilingual versions of their sites, and with that comes the demand for quality translation services.

If you’re already a speaker of a second language, you’re pretty much set. Otherwise, Duolingo seems to be the best resource for beginner learners. I’d definitely not just use Duolingo, as their “fluency score” doesn’t get you close to being employable but it’s a great starting point.

Data Analysis

The amount of data available to companies in 2018 is staggering. Most of them struggle with deciding what data is important, and how to analyze it all — which is where you come in.

There’s a large market opening up for consultants in the area of Google Analytics alone. Being able to show a business where their traffic is coming from, how they’re interacting with the site and how to get more of it can be incredibly powerful for their growth.

Google themselves offers courses on the subject, which I highly recommend if you want to go this route.

Facebook Ads

There has never been a platform as powerful as Facebook when it comes to creating highly targeted ads. The amount of data points they have on their users is mind-boggling.

This presents a big opportunity for businesses, but most don’t understand how to use it.

Facebook offers their own course on the platform, and there’s some good ones on Udemy as well. With Facebook Ads, a lot of it ends up being learned from experience so don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty with some low-budget test campaigns to show you know your stuff.

So, what skills do you think are growing in demand in 2018? What would you learn today?