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Why You Should Be Building Technology Skills

5th March 2019

Your early twenties are for building skills. 🏗

This is simply because when you’re young, you don’t much to live on (no kids, no mortgage, etc). So instead of focusing on making money, you want to be building skills, figuring out what you’re good at and what you like so that then you can make big bucks doing the right skills. This is why people say ‘The best investment you can make is yourself’.

Now, of all these amazing skills you build, it’s important to include tech. By tech (so technology), we’re talking about IT skills and practical work online. This can range from programming to digital marketing.

Here’s why tech skills are the bomb: 💣

 

1. The use of technology will only increase ↗

The future is technology. There’s only going to be more of it. After attending the Mobile World Congress and seeing robots playing pianos, holograms of people playing in a band and some crazy VR and AR products, my case stands even more.

Future employers will want people with tech skills. People who can adapt to the rapid development of technology and who knows how to use or market a product well. In 2014 a study said that more than 50% of employers required tech skills from their employees. And that was 2014 – imagine now!

As our world becomes more and more digitalised, it’s good to keep up, adapt, and make sure you’re never in position where a robot makes you redundant. 🤖

technology skills
they’re not coming for us… yet

 

2. You’ll need tech to build a business

If your plan is to start a business in the future, you’ll most definitely need to know how technology works and some tech building skills. Even if you’re a florist, you’ll need a website. And you’ll need to communicate effectively with your programmer so they build a website exactly how you want.

And if you want to build a great business, you’ll hire people who are smart and highly skilled. But you’ll still need to understand what they’re doing and how, so you can manage effectively and build something successful. How can you dream of building a food delivery drone if you know nothing about coding? Or a SaaS software? Or even an app? You don’t need to become an expert, but do learn enough to communicate. 

 

3. You’ll be able to make money flexibly

Here at Financially Mint I encourage building skills that allow you to make money online. This is simply because it gives a huge amount of flexibility and freedom without much experience. These are some examples:

  1. Translation
  2. Teaching
  3. Programming
  4. Digital Marketing
  5. Design
  6. Writing

Since they all involve a computer and working with clients online, I consider them tech skills or related to tech skills. And if you pick two of those skills and get really good at them, making money gets a bit easier. With those skills you can start an online business, become a freelancer and even add them to your CV for potential employers.

By learning these tech skills you’ll have the flexibility of working from home and online. This can be huge for students who don’t have much time, or anyone who wishes to work remotely. And if you’re studying a specific tech skill at uni (such as engineering, computer science, etc), then regard these other skills as diversification and skill exploring.

 

So which technology skills should I be building?

In general, there are 4 ways that you can learn tech skills:

  1. At university (studying computer science, etc)
  2. Self education (free programming school, blogs, books)
  3. Practising online (working for clients, etc)
  4. Through a job/internship

As you can see, the different tech skills that you want to be developing really depends on where you’re starting from and what you personally feel more comfortable doing. If you’re 20 and still at university or at an internship (#me), it’s unlikely you’ll know much about project management, big data analysis or quantitative reporting. For this reason, those 6 tech skills mentioned before are great for people who don’t know where to start and have little experience.

Because the truth is, most of the useful tech skills you’ll learn them at a job, or maybe on a very specific course. If you already have some experience and skills, continue exploring so you can figure out which skill you want to be putting more focus on.

Here are some examples of technology skills on demand in the workplace (researched):

  1. Programming
  2. Analysis of Big Data and BI
  3. Information Security
  4. Project Management
  5. Marketing
  6. Design
  7. Writing

And there are tons of resources out there to teach you skills online – and many times for free. Treehouse and Codecademy are great online programming schools. Coursera and Udemy have courses on anything you can imagine. The Open University will get you a full bachelors degree and Youtube will teach you about marketing.

technology skills
build VR skills 😎

So if you want to work in the next 10 years, build a business or make money flexibly, building tech skills are the way to go. And while you’re at it, you may find a specific skill that you’re good at and that you enjoy doing – that’s a career path right there! As long as you diversify your skills and learn how to adapt, you won’t be replaced by robots. 🤖

Which tech skill are you interested in building? 🤔

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My name's Araminta and I'm freelance FinTech Copywriter.

I started Financially Mint to help other 20 something year olds learn about money and fix their finances early in life 💪

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  • 5 Ways to Invest in Yourself in Your Twenties
  • How Life Design Interviews Will Help Get Your ‘Dream Career’
  • How Career Building and Exploration Allowed FG to Earn a $500,000 Salary
  • Career Capital: What it is and How to Build it
  • The 5 Rules to Effectively Manage People 👦

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Financially Mint is on another break! ☕ I will Financially Mint is on another break! ☕

I will be living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the next few months, and then hopefully heading to Australia. 
My plans for the next year:

I'm putting the career testing theory into practice. My next career test is working for an NGO here in Kuala Lumpur. This week will be my first week. I will be working with sex trafficking survivors and I've also been asked to do some financial education presentations to help the staff.

After that the plan is to move to Melbourne, Australia, and do my next career test: consulting. If that doesn't work out I will try another career test which may be more achievable: business development in a startup. Thanks to the amazing career books that I've read, I'm pretty confident I can get an interesting job. We'll see how it rolls. 🏀

How am I funding this? I'm very excited to say that I've managed to grow my part-time freelancing income to a full-time income that can sustain me in South East Asia (I would need to work full-time in Europe). I'm calling myself a 'Freelance FinTech Writer'. Rent is crazy cheap (like 300€/month) and it's literally cheaper to eat out than cook. I'm still able to save 15% of my income. 🎉🎉 The increase in clients and pay has been thanks to all the effort I put into Financially Mint, and to some crazy cold emailing and networking in the past few months. 
After some thought, I concluded that learning mark-up language (HTML + CSS) was a more efficient use of my time than writing blog posts and working on FM... so I am now taking a break to learn some basic coding and decide what to do next.

I will still be podcasting and taking part in the FI community on Twitter and everywhere else... so I'll still be seeing you around 😉

To our success 🎉🎉
Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄 Let's sa Only 30% of jobs are posted online. 🙄

Let's say you've got a list of career paths to test. You've figured out a direction, you know which sector you want to work in and you've got some cool companies in mind.

But then what? How do you get an internship in the company you really want to work for? How do you get a job in that specific NGO? How do you get them to notice you? 🤔

In FM's latest post I share a strategy that I am still testing but seems to work - copied from a book titled 'Designing your Life' by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans:

The strategy: Conducting 'Life Design' Interviews. .
A Life Design Interview is basically meeting the person that has your 'dream career' for coffee. ☕

You find someone who is working at the company you want to work for, in the sector you want to work for or simply has a position you're interested in, and you reach out to them (LinkedIn helps). You ask about their story, their position, how they got to where they are and their advice to people starting out. 
This is what I've been doing for the past month in Edinburgh, and of the 40 people I contacted, I met 8 of them for coffee, my goal to simply learn about their story.

With an added bonus: Trust. ✅

Not only did I learn stuff about working in a startup, or as a content writer or working in an NGO, but I also built a trusted connection. It's those connections that help you find the hidden jobs, the dream careers and the best opportunities.

Check out FM's latest post for a proper run down on Life Design interviews. 💪 (Last week we organised the FI Europe podcast retreat! An amazing 4 days doing speeches, masterminds, debates, boat trips, beach and surfing. Post on this coming soon 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #fieurope #lifedesign #interviews
Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads Investing in yourself now will return bucket loads in the future. 🔮

I talk a lot about this on Financially Mint - how taking the time to build career capital and explore career paths will allow you to find a career of best personal fit, which will then make you the money you need.

But it is true that I am personally at the very start of this journey, and so can't offer many examples of this working. 🤷‍♀️ Well today, this changes as I interview the Financial Gladiator, who did exactly that.

He went to university to study business in Poland, and finished his masters in Australia. In the meantime, he was doing internships, making connections, building skills and beefing up his portfolio. 
He says it himself: ' I always looked to add experience and skills to my repertoire rather than dollars' 💸.
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7 internships later in several different countries and industries and a lot of hustling, moving around and learning about what career fitted him best, FG ended up in a job that paid him a six figure salary. This kept on snowballing, and in his early thirties he hit a salary of over $500,000. .
That goes to show how much investing in yourself can return in the future.
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$500,000 annual salary doesn't need to be your goal, but it still goes to show that you'll make the bulk of your money after investing in your own career. 📈

A great interview filled with actionable career advice and FG's complete story, check out FM's latest blog post! (Edinburgh castle 🔥)
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #careerbuilding #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
Most of us don't know what we want to do in our tw Most of us don't know what we want to do in our twenties 🤷‍♀️. And that's absolutely normal.

But that's why we don't want to be committing to one thing - who know what you might want to do in 5 years? 🧐

Instead of committing, why not be exploring, investigating and testing career paths. But how can you do this cleverly without being a typical 'millennial-career-hopper'? By building career capital at the same time.

This means that every career test you do will help you build skills, connections and a more solid portfolio. If you have no idea where to start, here are some examples of jobs/activities that can help you build career capital:

1. Working for a growing organisation with a growing performance: this could be consulting, a startup - anywhere with a good mentor and team 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
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2. Graduate studies - for those who want to work in research, a think tank, etc.
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3. Building a valuable and transferable skill - skills such as writing, programming, designing, data science, etc will always be useful in the future 💻
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4. Creating content - you don't always need a shiny piece of paper or a medal to show that you've done something. Creating your own thing can be just as useful.
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And much more amazing career advice... in FM's latest blog post 🤓
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(I’m running out of pictures to post so here’s one of a beautiful evening in Edinburgh) .
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#financiallymint #budget #budgeting #personalfinance #savinghacks #makemoney #savemoney #money #studentmoney #studenthacks #studentlife #shoestringbudget #moneyhacks #moneysavinghacks #financialeducation #financialfreedom #adulting #savingtricks #earnmoney #lifeadvice #counsel #careeradvice #retirement #investing #peoplemanagement #skillbuilding #career #selfimprovement #inspiring #work
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