7 High-Income Skills You Can Learn For Free that AI Can’t Replace

Introduction

Hello everybody, today I have written about the seven high-income skills you can learn for free, and the fantastic thing about those skills is AI can’t replace them, not now or not in the future. So, go through the whole article and learn something about high-income skills. As soon as you see this title, you might think, “Hey, I know what this guy will talk about. So let me skip it, but read me out for 20 seconds, and then you can decide.

1- Problem Solving

The first high-income skill that I want to discuss is problem-solving. What is problem-solving? It is the art of identifying a problem and then solving that problem. You might say, hey, go ahead and solve sudoku puzzles in newspapers, and then you are good. No, the difference between solving a sudoku puzzle and improving problem-solving in the corporate world is that you gain some domain, industry, or functional knowledge. How do you do that? So that you can leverage it for the next ten years.

The first and most essential thing is identifying which domain or industry you want to work in. Go ahead and look into some of your dream companies:

• McKinsey & Company
• BCG
• Bain & Company
• Amazon

Check out their blog insights pages and open any article randomly. For example, in this picture, I am opening the featured insights on McKinsey, and one of the articles I find is the challenges in the climate tech space every day.

Try to find one article, and before reading it, think about the difficulties in the climatic space or the article you are reading about, then see, hey, it could be financed. It isn’t easy to get financing in the climate tech space. If it is retailed, think about the problems that come to your mind and the solutions. Go ahead and write down that list in two to three minutes, and every day, do this for five minutes. Only after reading you will realize the points you are missing out on.

If you do this in your domain, you will learn. What are the problems in your domain? And what are the solutions that are being offered? This is problem-solving in the corporate world. If you develop this skill, you will gain a lot of leverage over your colleagues. You are worker friends, everybody else and you can demand that higher salary. This is the high-income skill that I am discussing.

Before jumping into the second high-income skill, I want to consider it. Let me know if you would rate this problem-solving as a complex or soft skill. Go ahead and put it down in the comments. How would you differentiate problem-solving? I will add my answer in a day or two. Now, if you notice, going forward as well. I will give you a definition of what that skill is, in my opinion. Then, I will provide you with a practical way to develop that skill, and let me know if you have any challenges. We can take that discussion forward in the comment section itself. 

2- Personal Brand

So, let’s move into the second high-income skill, building a personal brand, in my definition. Building a personal brand does not mean earning much money through YouTube, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Building a personal brand means having a decent online presence through LinkedIn. One of the professional platforms, so that you get inbound opportunities, people will reach out to you with a job opportunity rather than you going and telling people that you need a job.

This works like a charm. I am discussing maintaining that minimum personal brand so that your network is built in a very organic way. Don’t expect wonders in the next year or two, but this personal brand will be the key if you consider the next ten years. You don’t need to be a creator, and you don’t need to be an influencer. But this could be the differentiator for that little bit of higher salary, job negotiation, or getting that new job.

How do you do that to start with using LinkedIn? Then, start adding comments to the people within your domain within your function and write relevant posts. I know people in the startup world who are struggling to get projects and are working to reach out to clients, and you know how they get their clients right now through their employees who have that personal brand on LinkedIn. If you have that brand, you are a startup, or another startup would want to pay you more and coach you into their company. Please don’t ignore that. That is the second high-income skill.

3- Communications

The third high-income skill that I want to highlight is communication. Again, communication is not for you to go and deliver at TikTok; communication is about ensuring the other person understands what you say. If you talk about ten things, the other person should be able to understand and remember at least six or seven; that’s it. That should be the goal of any good communicator, and how do you do that? A quick way to practice is to start by writing your notes daily.

For five minutes, all I am telling you is just five minutes, guys. These five minutes could again be a game-changer for you. What do you write in that five minutes? Just think through whatever has happened the entire day and then put it down as bullet points or number it. Please don’t write it as a story or a long paragraph. Once you write these points, there is one more task that you should prioritize or rearrange—the order of the things that are more important versus less important.

This is the only thing you should do, and over time, you will develop a habit of writing a good email where you prioritize good stuff at the top, and you will leave out the things that are not very important when you go ahead and speak with executives. You will think about the most important things first, then leave out the rest. Start with your daily activities because it is elementary for you to write down these things, and slowly, you can move on to your work world.

This is called the answer-first approach in management consulting: McKinsey & Company, BCG, and Bain & Company. All these consultants do this daily, so they are paid a lot for crisp communication. Please make this a habit. This could be an excellent skill to develop over the next ten years. Whether GenAI is here or not, whether there is a new skill or technology here, this communication skill will keep you among the highest-rated employees and in very high demand in the market.

4- Taking Risks

This fourth high-income skill I want to discuss is not a complex or a soft skill, but it is related to your mindset, which is your ability to take calculated risks. Let me tell you a small story over here. Whenever I worked at New Sigma McKensey and Accenture, I was always afraid of going and telling something radically different or making a small risk in front of my manager because I was thinking, hey, I am earning a decent salary. If this is a bad thing, my manager might rate me down or fire me.

So why take that risk? But over time, I realized that taking some of these risks is acceptable. Even if it’s small, start with those risks, for example, proposing a small team outing for your team, a small mentoring session, or a brown back session. These things will increase your confidence, and you might offer a much more radical change.

I would request you to please do that wherever you are working. Small changes don’t take massive risks but small, calculated risks. Depending on the team and the company, what the rest should be is up to you. But do not ignore that.

5- Data Analysis

Data analysis is the fifth high-income skill I want to share with you. I’m not saying that. Hey, learn SQL or Python. I am talking about understanding the patterns within the primary data. If you are given a chart or an Excel table, can you identify patterns? Pattern recognition is now one of the most common interview questions. It is there in CAT, like data interpretation. It is there in the GMAT. Is there every single standardized test that you want to take? Is there a reason companies also have them in the first or second round of interviews?

How do you develop this skill? I’m giving you a link to a swift video. Please go ahead and watch that video. Where someone speaks about how do you look into graphs or charts? You gain the concept from this video, so look into data sets from Kaggle. You understand that there is a specific way of identifying patterns, and this is called exploratory data analysis, EDA. If you go and ask any data scientist, the first thing that they would do is clean the data and then do data analysis.

This is nothing but pattern recognition. Understand that this pattern recognition could be one of the easiest ways for you to get into data science and then subsequently into artificial intelligence. I know people who leverage this data analysis as a skill and then moved from electrical engineering to AI mechanical engineering to AI, starting with this data analysis as a skill. 

6- Side Hustle

The sixth high-income skill I want to discuss relates to the mindset of side hustles. You might say I already have a good job or don’t have time for a side hustle. Guys, first of all, understand that developing a side hustle or making money through additional sources of income is a mindset shift. It is not about having time versus not. It is not about earning enough versus not. You can think that, hey, let me generate a second source. Let me make more money.

Once you get into that mindset, it could be easy for you to be financially free, and you can pay off many of these EMIs through your secondary source of income. What could be a good way? Well, you might say, hey, I reach out to a lot of startups and reach out to many people, but nobody gives me any work to do on the weekend. That is where your brand will come in. That’s the second high-income skill that we talked about.

When you start writing on LinkedIn, people will reach out to you, or you can reach out to people and say, hey, this is something that I know very well. I have been writing many posts, or I have shot some videos around it, and then you can reach out to people in the United States, United Kingdom, or any of the Western countries because these guys can give you some of that work and outsource it to you.

Why would they give it to you? Well, because there is a cost arbitrage. Getting support at a reasonable price point in the US or other Western world isn’t easy. So, if you exhibit that skill, small startups or even individuals might want to outsource some of the work to you because it is much more affordable. So please do not ignore that side hustle to start personal branding; it might be necessary. 

7- Programming

The seventh high-income skill that I want to discuss is programming. Well, it doesn’t matter if you are an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, art designer, or science guy; it doesn’t matter. You have to get into programming, and why is that? A lot of companies are now building their leverage. That is an advantage of generating more revenues and reducing costs through technology. And for that to happen, they need people who understand and do programming. That is why Programming is the most in-demand employability skill.

If you have that skill, you can get into those jobs where companies are trying to leverage that technology to reduce costs and increase profits. That is where startup valuations are moving. That is where traditional industries are moving. So, learning programming is not an option anymore. You might say, hey, the tool I learned might be outdated soon. I have learned particular things over the last five years that are not useful anymore.

I agree. So, learn about the programming basics. For example, in the last 15 years, Java has still been in demand. Python and Java are programming languages that have been in demand for a long time. The tools on top of them might keep changing, but the underlying skills won’t. So please think about it and see what course you can quickly enroll in, either Coursera or Udemy. There are free and fantastic courses that you can start with and then enroll in a paid boot camp.

I hope you agree with me on these skills, and I request you categorize each of these skills into either. It is a challenging or soft skill; mention it in the comments. Let’s debate over it because we can look at it differently. 

Why I Discover High-Income Skills You Can Learn For Free that AI Can’t Replace

High-income skills can help boost your career prospects, increase earning potential, and stand out. High-income skills are in high demand, hard to automate, and valuable to employers across industries. The era we are living in today is a time of significant change. You also see that artificial intelligence is doing a lot of work these days; let’s say that humans have started doing many of their tasks with artificial intelligence.

So, the wisdom is to learn some skills that can’t be done with AI right now. That’s why I short out these seven skills for you, which AI has not done for the coming ten years. These high-income skills you can learn for free from Coursera or Udemy. You can learn these high-income skills from books, podcasts, blogs, and other resources. Investing in your education and development allows you to acquire skills that AI can’t replace and leverage them to create a meaningful and exciting career.

Thank you so much, guys. Please share it with your friends, brothers, sisters, or whoever is in your network so that they can also develop these high-income skill sets and remain relevant in the market over the next ten years. If you didn’t read my last blog post about AI, “How to Learn AI in 2024,” you click on the title and read it now. The article has extra value content for you. See you again in the next article. Bye bye.