Of the ones mentioned so far my highest ranking would be learning to learn, saying no, and my first love, programming. Here’s one not mentioned so far:
Consulting, the skill of influencing others at their request. (See e.g. Jerry Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting.) This has elements of teaching, but is worth more on the market. It relies on broad experience rather than specialized knowledge. It calls for your clients seeing you as a trusted advisor, relying on you not for deep expertise in their own domain but for an outside perspective, at least a little less tainted by internal biases than they are.
A consultant is often simply someone who is “less wrong” than their client, but to deploy this effectively requires a number of sub-skills: empathy, negotiation, listening, flexibility, networking...
Initially I picked up this skill because I was fed up with wasting my programming skills in the service of employers who seemed to systematically mismanage their own projects. (In retrospect that’s not such a good reason to change careers, but that’s how I saw things back then.) I went freelance and focused on helping businesses which wanted to improve their project management and development strategies.
Oh… Long story, because “get a consulting contract” is nothing like a well defined event with a single causal chain leading to it. I’ll try to summarize...
I spent some time out of work and burning through my savings. While I was doing that I “worked” for no pay, organizing the local community of folks interested in the topic I was passionate about (Extreme Programming). This gave me lots of opportunity to network. About two years later, the passion and the networking started paying dividends, just at the time my savings were running out. I landed one small training gig. Then a small consultancy across the Channel (I live in France) funded me to put together a few marketing seminars. I had established enough credibility by then that this convinced one client, then another.
Somewhere in there I parlayed my 10 years’ work experience into a master’s degree in computer science. I also attended lots of conferences, read a fair bit, and generally kept busy even when I wasn’t making money.
Of the ones mentioned so far my highest ranking would be learning to learn, saying no, and my first love, programming. Here’s one not mentioned so far:
Consulting, the skill of influencing others at their request. (See e.g. Jerry Weinberg’s Secrets of Consulting.) This has elements of teaching, but is worth more on the market. It relies on broad experience rather than specialized knowledge. It calls for your clients seeing you as a trusted advisor, relying on you not for deep expertise in their own domain but for an outside perspective, at least a little less tainted by internal biases than they are.
A consultant is often simply someone who is “less wrong” than their client, but to deploy this effectively requires a number of sub-skills: empathy, negotiation, listening, flexibility, networking...
Initially I picked up this skill because I was fed up with wasting my programming skills in the service of employers who seemed to systematically mismanage their own projects. (In retrospect that’s not such a good reason to change careers, but that’s how I saw things back then.) I went freelance and focused on helping businesses which wanted to improve their project management and development strategies.
How did you get your first consulting contracts?
Oh… Long story, because “get a consulting contract” is nothing like a well defined event with a single causal chain leading to it. I’ll try to summarize...
I spent some time out of work and burning through my savings. While I was doing that I “worked” for no pay, organizing the local community of folks interested in the topic I was passionate about (Extreme Programming). This gave me lots of opportunity to network. About two years later, the passion and the networking started paying dividends, just at the time my savings were running out. I landed one small training gig. Then a small consultancy across the Channel (I live in France) funded me to put together a few marketing seminars. I had established enough credibility by then that this convinced one client, then another.
Somewhere in there I parlayed my 10 years’ work experience into a master’s degree in computer science. I also attended lots of conferences, read a fair bit, and generally kept busy even when I wasn’t making money.