How I Jumped my Income from $23,000 to $75,000+ a year in LESS THAN 12 Months
The insane true story of my professional and personal life between 2018 and 2019.
In 2017, I had lost my dream career and found myself down bad working as a security officer for $12/hour. I was broke and had no professional skills, and my family was careening straight toward homelessness and worse.
I needed to make more money desperately, and I needed it ASAP.
After one very frustrated patrol during my security shift, I had resolved to learn a new skill and change into a more lucrative career, no matter what it took.
That was the first step to boosting my income by over $50,000 in less than one year.
Phase ONE: Reskilling
After a bit of soul-searching and Google research, I set my sights on digital marketing, specifically Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as a realistic career change.
The barrier to entry seemed low enough, I found it interesting, and it had some overlap with a skillset I already possessed (writing).
NOTE: I’m going to refer a lot to SEO and digital marketing because it’s the path I took. These principles, however, transcend marketing and are applicable across virtually all career paths. You do not not need to pursue digital marketing in order to boost your income and reach your goals.
For the next several months, I devoured every article, YouTube video, and podcast I could find on SEO.
I had a $0 budget, so I had to rely entirely on 100% free resources. Thankfully this included awesome zero-cost certificates from HubSpot Academy and Google’s learning platform, which are generally respected in the digital marketing space.
In the process of consuming all this content, I paid attention to the tools that experts in the field most often cited, relied on, or explicitly assigned importance to. I started browsing open job positions in the same field to cross-reference and confirm what I was hearing.
With this in mind, I started using free but important tools, exploiting free trials for paid tools; signing up to monthly courses, raiding the lessons, and quitting before the next billing period…
…and then I started a site of my own and ranked that #1 for “taekwondo basics.”
Then a friend of mine started a self-defense instruction business. I volunteered my new skills and ranked that website #1 on Google for “self defense instructor.”
Armed with this hacked-together experience, I started seeking a job with a real company. After a couple of months, I finally got some interviews and received a job offer at a local marketing agency.
I took it. It earned me a $10,000/year salary raise.
But my story isn’t over yet. Not even close.
Practical Reskilling Strategies
Deep education. Devour all the content on this field that you can, with an emphasis on topics that (a) get you functional as a beginner and (b) expose you to the thinking and tactics of the highest performers in your chosen field. Cross-reference this with current job opening descriptions to find out what are your biggest bang-for-buck skills and tools to learn.
Learn the tools for the job. This information should come up in the course of your deep education and while researching current job listings for the type of positions you want.
Make your own experience. Put your creativity cap on and brainstorm ways to make your own experience. In my case, nothing stopped me from getting a website and writing and ranking content, volunteering to help other businesses and startups, or freelancing without “W2” work experience.
Stretch Projects. There are often creative ways to stretch yourself in your current job to gain the experience you need—usually by volunteering and/or taking the initiative to start and finish projects on your own.
Get Relevant Certifications (Free or Low Cost). This is really important if you want to circumvent having no college degree or the wrong college degree (like me). Keep in mind that these are resume boosters and rarely as powerful or useful to your actual skill learning—or as likely to land you a job—as real experience is. Not all certification courses are well-built; use the information and the piece of paper to your maximal advantage.
Phase TWO: Upskilling
During this time, I repeated my initial reskilling process, but this time in service of upskilling: improving and diversifying my industry skills.
I tried my hand in anything and everything, actively solving problems in the organization. I quickly gained a reputation for myself as a workhorse and creative problem-solver—and knowledgeable far above the implications of my low-level title.
After being they only a few months, I got a promotion and another $11,000/yr raise.
During my time at the agency, these are some of the important problems I solved:
A massive workflow bottleneck putting several teams behind
Lead generating tools that needed to be reusable across client websites and look better than what we were previously using (using brand new skills I refined on the fly during this project)
Burned through hundreds of late tasks, compensating for the slack of a severely underperforming employee, allowing my team to hit its goals and win an office prize
Most importantly, I continued to work on my friend’s self-defense instruction website. This sort of freelance experience allowed me to test and tweak skills in a less risky environment.
And, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was about to pay off in a way I didn’t yet understand, because…
Suddenly all my clients were disappearing to our other office, half way across the country.
Layoff was imminent. My boss wouldn’t say it exactly, but she was leaving hints, and becoming increasingly scarce…
I saw the writing on the wall.
Remember how I kept working on my buddy’s website? Here’s how it paid off:
I got a call from a recruiter. I usually ignore calls, but this time, for inexplicable reasons, I picked up.
After hearing that she was recruiting for a massive, famous Fortune 50 company, I immediately sent her my resume…
She called me back. “Do you have specific data from your clients you can use here?”
“I can’t use client data from the agency,” I said. I’d signed an NDA.
“What about a freelance client?”
Sure enough, I did. I had incredible, firm numbers to show off on my resume, which proved my ability and expertise, and made me stick out. All from my work on my buddy’s website.
My recruiter later told me I beat out 60+ applicants to win an analyst position with that Fortune 50 company.
And an additional $31,000 yearly salary boost.
Practical Upskilling Strategies
Continuing education. This includes taking more courses and certifications—being strategic with your time (more on this in other posts). But often more useful is staying up-to-date on industry news and trends, keeping your finger on the pulse of the cutting edge strategy and tactics, and staying on the lookout for emerging skills sets to consider acquiring in your area(s) of work. Blogs, courses, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube videos are all excellent places to find this information. Sometimes Instagram, LinkedIn and X/Twitter have great educational influencers to follow as well. 15-20 minutes a day is often enough.
Stretch Projects. So good it gets a second mention. Create as much experience as you are able to without overextending yourself.
Targeted freelancing. Take on a couple side clients who are in industries you want to work in or who present problems you want to solve. This is another way to create the experience you want and need—and it’s a bit more flexible (and lucrative) than stretch projects at your day job.
Chronicle & Communicate. Real numbers and results are powerful. Keep track of all the processes you put together, big problems you solve, and big favors you do for your teammates. Not everything is worth recapping, but these should absolutely come up when you talk to your boss about performance, promotions, and raises. If not, these are excellent answers to have at the ready when you interview for a higher paying job elsewhere.
My Secret Weapon…
It almost sounds unbelievable, but I quadrupled my income—starting from 0 professional skills—via a successful reskill and upskill process, within less than a year.
I didn’t have professional skills, but I wasn’t quite lost at sea. I did have a secret weapon, without which I would have never succeeded…
I knew how to learn.
I had invested in learning how to learn for many years, both independently and through school.
It was the skill of learning that allowed me to quickly acquire the skills and knowledge I needed to change careers and then move up rapidly.
Since then, I’ve only gotten better. I finished my master’s degree in teaching and learning, became a leading expert and educator of scientific training methodology of combat sports, and now I’m finishing up a doctorate in teaching and learning, too.
Out of this experience and research, I developed the unique and cutting-edge shock learning method to become functional, competent, and adaptable with virtually any skill faster than traditional methods.
Oh, and I added another $20,000/yr to my yearly income. And counting.
Everyone’s circumstance is different. Not every industry and career path has the same constraints and dynamics. Your mileage may vary.
But I truly believe learning how to learn is the master skill: the skill that acts as a gateway to becoming skilled at anything you want or need to succeed in life…and enjoy it.
If you commit yourself to the reskilling or upskilling—learning—process, you absolutely can significantly increase your yearly income, too.