5 High Income Skills for Students to Learn in 2024

okay so over the last 12 years since I first became a student I learned loads of high income skills that have helped me personally make millions of dollars on the internet while I was at University studying medicine I started my own business helping people get into med school and then I went on to start this YouTube channel which led to me starting lots of other businesses and now I'm in the ridiculously privileged position to be making life-changing amounts of money every year and I have quite a good understanding of what skills I would recommend to my former self if he wanted to make that sort of money at some point so in this video I want to break down five high income skills with examples of other people who literally doing this that you can hopefully use to get inspired to learn one of them yourself and make some money either while you're a student or further down the line and if you happen to be new to the channel then hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm also the author of The New York Times bestselling book Feelgood productivity which is about how to be more productive in a way that's actually enjoyable meaningful and sustainable and I've been making videos on this channel for the last 7 years documenting my journey from Brook medical student to entrepreneur to author and I've documented and shared all of the learnings and failures and experiences along the way and so I'm hoping that you'll get some value out of this video and if you're new to the channel you might like to consider subscribing as well okay so before we get into the specific skills I want to zoom out a little bit and talk through how I would think about making money like what's the philosophy of actually making money if for example you're a student and you want to actually make money someday so here's kind of how I think about it let's say you are a student this was for example me when I was a 19yearold medical student and the thing is it's sort of like in in the world of capitalism that we live in today everyone has above their head a personal stock price this is essentially your Worth to the market I don't like the system any more than you do I think this is this is this is a bad system it's just unfortunately the world that we live in and so if we want to thrive in the world that we live in we want to appreciate that this is the thing everyone that you meet has above them a personal stock price it's like how every company has a particular value now back when I was a medical student um my personal stock price was Zero no one was going to hire me to do anything in fact maybe they would have done maybe you know when I was a medical student I was able to earn $450 an hour £450 an hour uh by working at the local library when I graduated medical school and started working as a doctor suddenly my personal stock price became around about £450 per hour that's how much doctors earn in the UK when you are just starting out that's how much residents earn in the US when you're just starting out this is the personal stock price now let's say if you're a student and you have high income skills essentially those skills are skills that increase your personal stock price so let's say you know you might have a student next to you whose personal stock price is £50 an hour or it might be £100 an hour or it might even be 500 an hour or it might be whatever the thing is this is how much that particular person can command in the marketplace of Commerce okay so that's thing number one that we want to appreciate thing number two that we want to appreciate is that you know a lot of students sometimes I'll give talks uh at universities and things and you know I'll I'll put out a question to the audience and I'll kind of ask um who here wants to be an entrepreneur and depending on the crowd like if I'm speaking to I don't know like finance and tech people every wants to be an entrepreneur if I'm speaking to medical students almost no one puts the hand up in saying that they want to be an entrepreneur or they want to run their own business which is totally fine because obviously medical students normally want to become doctors that's not the same as running your own business but the thing that I would say is that everyone is already an entrepreneur you already run your own business even me back when I was a medical student and back when I was working full-time as a doctor I was actually running my own business it was just that my business was hired out to one employer which was the National Health Service here in the UK and the rate that I was charging my employer was £450 per hour so it's like I've got one client in my business that client is my employer and the rate the amount of money my business is worth is £450 an hour and in a way we are all entrepreneurs because we are all selling ourselves in some way to the market you might not like to think of your job as selling yourself to the market but in unfortunately the capitalist world that we live in you are in fact selling yourself to the market so you are already an entrepreneur and you have a person your your business the business of you has a stock price in the same way that Apple has a stock price Apple is a business it has a stock price you as an individual are a business and you also have a stock price so knowing that this is the the state of the world that we live in essentially how do you make that number go up how do you increase your personal stock price price how do you get more leverage how do you make it so that you know your one employer your one client isn't only paying you £450 an hour what if this client decides to fire you what if you you know get laid off from your job as a lot of people did during the pandemic uh-oh now your business has zero clients and now you're not making any money this is potentially bad because you've got bills and stuff to pay what if the next job you could only get was maybe similar price5 an hour that's not a very good living that you can make essentially you're an entrepreneur you have your own business is the business of you and that business has a personal St price and the value of this essentially correlates with your skills the more skills you have that are correlated with making money the more your personal stock price is going to go up now there are a whole host of skills that will increase your Worth to the marketplace but there are also a whole host of skills that will not increase your Worth to the marketplace again for the record I don't like the system anymore than you do but we're kind of stuck with it because it's a system that we have right now and so we can kind of think of these skills as low-income skills and high income skills so if for example you are in the UK being a doctor is unfortunately a low income skill that's being a junior doctor for example if however you train for 15 years to become a neurosurgeon being a neurosurgeon is a high income skill which in the UK would maybe make you I don't know 300K if you do private practice and maybe 100K if you don't do private practice if you're in the US that's worth over a million dollars a year it's a very high income skill neuros surgeon as a skill has a different value depending on which Market you're in in the US which is a private healthcare system it has got a way higher value than in the UK which is a state funded Healthcare System this is one example what else are skills well you know playing a guitar is unfortunately a low income skill unless you are literally the best in the world I mean if you're the best in the world at anything it sort of becomes a high income skill but you know that's aside but you know being able to play the guitar broadly a low- income skill being able to code an app is a very high income skill being able to write an academic essay is unfortunately a low-income skill it does not pay very much in terms of the marketplace that we currently live in however being able to write a sales page or a letter is a very high income skill this is called copywriting this is if you were for example to take the skills of academic essay writing and apply them to persuasive writing you know the person who writes what's on the Apple iPad homepage that tries to convince people to buy an iPad that is that person is paid a lot of money because that is a very high income skill that translates to a lot of money in the marketplace at University you learn a lot of low-income skills unfortunately and most University degrees and most school systems do not actually teach you high income skills a lot of high- income skills are things that don't sound particularly sexy and things that you often have to learn on your own now one of the skills that we're going to be talking about later in this video is webd design and for that you're going to need a web hosting platform which is where hostinger comes in who are very kindly sponsoring this video now hostinger is where I personally host my own website Ali ABD dal. com which gets lots and lots of hits every week and every month so you can check that out if you like and actually hosting it is the world's fastest growing web hosting company it is incredibly easy to use and it's also very affordable so if you click on the link in the video description then you can sign up and you can start building your own website completely from scratch without actually having any coding or web design skills for most people looking to create a personal website the Premium plan is probably the best option and that starts at under $3 per month and with that you'll get a completely free domain name you also get free email addresses to use and the Premium plan actually supports up to 100 websites that are all kept really secure online it also has built-in AI tools that you can use to make the whole website buil building process even faster so for example the AI website builder creates a unique website after you've just answered three questions and then you can customize that website that they've created for you super easily with their drag and drop editing features that are really cool I genuinely think that everyone has at least something that they can share and talk about online so I definitely encourage you to think about creating your own personal website and I would 100% recommend trying out hostinger if you're not sure where to start the Premium plan is just one option so do be sure to check out the other options to see if you can find the right one for you for example their business plan has e-commerce features if you want to actually sell stuff online and it's got a bunch more AI tools like a writer and an SEO tool to help drive more people to your website again there is a link to sign up down in the video description and if you use my code Ali abdal I check out you will get an extra 10% discount they also do have a 30-day money back guarantee for peace of mind so you can try it out and if you don't like it you can just email them and get your money back so anyway thank you so much hostinger for sponsoring this video okay so the final thing to keep in mind in this entire equation is that the value of a skill does somewhat depend on who is buying that skill so for example let's say you're just really really really good at the guitar now the guitar is normally a low-income skill because normally the people who buy the skill of being really good at the guitar are parents who want their kid to learn the guitar you could be a guitar teacher and now your amazing guitar playing skills are not worth very much because you're teaching guitar to kids for example or you could be an amazing guitar player and if the person buying that skill happens to be a music record company and they're giving you a record deal for being able to play finger style guitar like an absolute Legend suddenly that skill has become a high income skill we kind of want to keep keep in mind the fact that like a lot of people try and make money from playing music most people don't make very much money from doing it so it's a lot harder to sell that skill to music record labels purely because of you know the laws of supply and demand and so in that sense playing the guitar is normally a low-income skill but with a lot of luck and the right circumstances and if you're absolutely freaking amazing it can become a high income skill those are not the sorts of skills I want to talk about in this video I don't want to talk about skills that are only High income if you get really lucky because then you get rich but you have to be really lucky I want to talk about skills that are high income that broadly will increase your personal stock price your your your Worth to the marketplace without you having to be literally the best in the world at it and without you having to be super super lucky or super super well connected okay final piece of the puzzle before we move on is this it's really really important to appreciate that there are two different types of businesses you can sell to Consumers I. E normal people or you can sell to businesses so for example if we use a guitar teacher example again you know trying to teach guitar lessons to normal people is selling to Consumers but if for example trying to get a a record deal with Sony is selling your skill to a business trying to be a writer where you say to your friends hey I'll write letters to your grandparents for you or something dumb like that is trying to sell to Consumers trying to be a writer but selling your writing services to businesses by saying you'll do copywriting for their social media for their sales pages that is selling to businesses and generally we do not want to be trying to sell to Consumers if there was just one thing that I could get into the minds of everyone trying to start businesses is that it is so much easier to make money when you think about what is your worth what are your skills that you can sell to a business rather than what are what's the value of your skills to a normal person like you and your friends and stuff so all of these high income skills we're going to be talking about are going to be trying to sell to businesses because businesses have lots and lots of money to spend and the Way businesses value money is very very different to how consumers value money okay so with all of that in mind these are the five skills we're going to be talking about and there will be time stamps in the video description so do please skip around if you feel like it but one thing I would say is like you might be like oh you know three design I don't need to think about that like throughout as I talk about these different high high income skills I'm going to be sharing literal real life examples of people who have made money using these skills and so even if right now you might be thinking I suck at Arts I'll never be a designer or I don't know I hate the idea of learning to code it's like okay but I would still recommend you potentially watch the video because a it juices my watch time uh but more importantly by seeing the examples and seeing kind of how different people are actually making money it just gives you a bit of a firmware update in your own mind it helps you appreciate oh this is how you actually make money this is how you increase your personal stock price all right so high income skill number one is being a software consultant for businesses now this sounds boring but it's really not this is super super cool basically businesses all use different software and often businesses are run and manned by people who are way less techsavvy than you are as a student you're a student so you have grown up on the internet and you know how to use software hopefully for example you might be familiar with the app notion I've made dozens of videos about notion you might be using notion at school you might know people use notion notion is an app that a lot of students will use for their personal life but actually notion is also an app that a lot of businesses including mine use to manage their business operations and so if you can get good at using that software you can become a consultant where you help businesses you train them in how to use the software it's sounds dumb it sounds like surely like you figured out notion on your own and you didn't need to hire an expert to teach you how to use notion obviously because you're a kid and kids are more you know have more initiative than people in their 30s 40s and 50s who broadly are the people who are working and running businesses it sounds dumb but actually businesses will hire a lot of Consultants to teach them basic stuff that they could just teach themselves based on the internet the reason they do that is because business owners don't have time I am now a business owner I know how to learn stuff on the internet I could teach myself any skill I want to because I've been doing this for like 15 years and I know how to use computers and I could teach myself anything I want but at this point in my life it's just not worth my own time to teach myself the skill I would pay $500 an hour to hire someone to teach the skill to me because my time is worth more than $500 an hour and so you might think that businesses are being dumb and some of them is like yeah they're not very text heavy and they just sort of want some handholding and that's okay but actually it's worth appreciating that a business will pay to learn something that you as an individual can absolutely just teach yourself so I'm going to use an example of one of my own team members her name is Molina she's currently our head of social media and when Molina was at University she basically just graduate Molina how old are you I'm 23 now Molina is 23 now but when she was at University she was working as a notion consultant for businesses and this is what her proposal to businesses would look like so this is in Spanish because she was working with clients in South America but you can see this is pretty nice you know she's charging $300 for a 90minut zoom session teaching a company how to use notion she's charging $11,000 for four sessions and she's even said 20% off if you buy four sessions that are 90 minutes each it's $800 that's a pretty high income skill that's more money than fully qualified trained consultants in the UK who are doctors with 15 years of experience and Molina was doing this doing notion Consulting when she was like 18 19 years old at University I've just actually been informed that Molina was 2122 when she did this but like same the same kind of idea you get it like there's no there's really no difference between an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old don't tell anyone I said that the other thing that's interesting about this proposal is look at the team spaces on the side General engineering design design product marketing operations HR and legal Molina has deliberate like I guarantee you as a student those are not the categories on your sidebar in the notion page it might be work and home and essays and assignments but a business has engineering design product marketing operations HR illegal and the fact that Molina has put those specific things in the sidebar of her little proposal means that she's really really appealing to businesses a normal person is not going to pay someone $800 for four sessions teaching them how to use notion but a business I like I would pay that in an absolute heartbeat I think it's an absolute steal it's worth pointing out here that the way Molina learned notion was not by taking classes on how to use notion it was by unsurprisingly watching YouTube videos you're a student you know how to learn by watching stuff on the internet Molina learned how to use notion by watching a few YouTube videos she made her own notion workspace she got familiar with using the software and then realized huh I've got this skill of using this piece of software I know businesses use the skill great anytime businesses do anything you know you can charge them quite a lot of money for teaching them how to do the thing or helping them improve the way that they already do the thing Okay so we've talked about notion but actually there's dozens and dozens hundreds thousands of other software that businesses use some of the software that we use is for example convertkit HubSpot we've daed with assana we use help Scout we use QuickBooks we use kajabi to host some of our courses we use web flow we use framer some of the time there there's so much software out there that businesses use and if as a student you can teach yourself to use that particular piece of software you can then become a consultant for that software for business in your local area or businesses online and a lot of this software to be honest is probably not things you're going to need as a student HubSpot is a CRM as a student you probably don't even know what CRM means it's basically a massive database that businesses use to keep all of their contacts and so they can figure out okay this person is at this company and we need to sell to them in this way so like you as an individual have no reason to learn how to use HubSpot but if you do and you get good at it CU it's not hard and there's like loads of tutorials on the internet and stuff you can then become a HubSpot consultant for businesses the other really nice thing about this and which is why it's such a high- income skill is that by doing consulting for businesses you actually learn so much you're basically creating your own business where you're doing consulting for other businesses so you learn how to price your services you learn how to sell them you learn how to persuade someone over a zoom call or over the phone or over an inperson meeting to part with their money to give you the services you learn how to fulfill on that particular order you learn the language of business you learn how to speak to entrepreneurs you learn how to speak in terms of return on investment none of this is stuff that they will teach you at University even if you do an MBA I have a lots of friends who've done mbas they don't learn this stuff either you only learn this stuff by doing it which is why when you're a student and you try and become a software consultant for other businesses I guarantee it will be one of the highest income skills you could possibly learn oh by the way if you're enjoying this video you might like to check out Sunday Snippets which is my completely free email newsletter where every Sunday I send a little email sharing some of the stuff that I'm learning in real time along this entrepreneurial journey I share insights from the books that I've read or conversations I've had with other entrepreneurs so if if you're interested in this making money stuff I think you'll really get a lot of value from this newsletter you can check it out Ali abdal .

com/srobiyt a good copywritten sales page and a bad copywritten sales page might just be a few percentage points of conversion so okay going to dive into another sort of business class here essentially let's say you've got a website this is the website and let's say at the bottom of the website there is a buy now button and then you know the website has stuff on it maybe there's some pictures and stuff so let's use the example of my own course uh parttime YouTuber Academy where that button is for I think 997 obviously it has to end in a 7even cuz you know whatever so anytime someone goes through this page and clicks buy I am earning or my business is earning $997 now the conversion rate on our sales page is currently 0. 5% or something like that that means of every 200 people that visit we get one sale great so every time 200 people visit the thing on average 0. 5% will convert I.

E will buy the 997 product so we make $997 for every 200 visitors we get on the website now there are some people who have sales page where the conversion rate is 1% or even 2% or even I've heard people who have a 4% conversion rate so what would it look like if we managed to increase our conversion rate from 0. 5% to 2% you know that what that would look like is for 200 people we now get four sales it doesn't seem like a lot but now 200 people is making us $4,000 rather than $1,000 there is a big difference between $1,000 and $4,000 now in our case our parttime YouTuber Academy course makes over just over a million dollars a year or something like that with a 0. 5% conversion rate if someone were to copyright our landing page our sales page and if we were to Able if we were able to increase that conversion rate to just 2% from 0.

5 to 2% instead of it being a $1 million a year business it would be a $4 million a year business and what is the difference between a 0. 5% and a 2% conversion rate it is copywriting if the sales page is a little bit more persuasive it increases this conversion rate and you don't have to increase this conversion rate by much to make a massive difference to the top and bottom line of a business which is why copywriting is a very very very high income skill it's not that hard to learn there are books that talk about it copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards is my personal favorite there are loads of books about it loads of YouTube videos about it this guy Cardinal Mason has a YouTube channel where he talks about how he makes money as a copywriter he's a little bit Guru with his stuff but the stuff is genuinely very good he does screen recording e type videos where he he'll literally show you his screen as he's writing an email that's making thousands of dollars and it's just super cool to see the genuine behind the scenes of this sort of stuff but hopefully you can appreciate with this example if a if we were to hire a good copywriter which we now have um are you know we'd be able to add $3 million directly to the bottom line of our business that is huge obviously we wouldn't pay a copyright of $3 million but like if someone were able to say hey your conversion rate is currently 0. 5% I guaranteed to get it to at least 2% and I just want 10% and be like of course I'd be making an extra $3 million and that person would be making $300,000 the 10% of you know the difference just by copywriting our sales page it's a very very very high income skill so copywriting is one high income skill that you can use for writers the other one is Ghost writing two friends of mine Dicky Bush and Nicholas Cole have an online course and a YouTube channel where they teach you how to do ghost writing to make loads of money from it and I've actually got three interviews with them on my podcast Channel I will link them down below and maybe up there so if you're interested in ghost writing as very high income writing skill you should check out those interviews and they give you the whole road map of how to make money as a ghost writer all right High income skill number three is to be a designer now this could be a web designer or it could be a general graphic designer because again we're thinking about selling to businesses so what what kind of design skills do businesses need your mind might come to okay well they need a design for the website yeah they do and if they make apps then they need some sort of designs for the apps yes they do but there's also loads More Design assets that businesses need and pay for for example I've paid a lot of money for my YouTube Banner that's a design asset if businesses post Instagram carousels those are design assets businesses create ads that they put on billboards and on social media and stuff those require design assets I know a lot of entrepreneurs business owners at this point and one of the common things we all lament is how hard it is to find good designers my brother runs a startup um it's called coal you can check it out and they hired a designer and I think they were looking to pay them $400,000 a year and and I was like surely you can find someone 400k and he was like yeah no it's still really hard finding good designers I like huh that's interesting in their case they were looking for product designer someone who could actually you know design the the user interface and the user experience of a product but even outside of that like finding a really good designer is kind of hard to come by and so it becomes a very high value skill because design in some capacity is a skill that basically every business needs and most businesses if if if a business is like under about 20 30 people they probably can't afford to have a fulltime designer on the team and so what they'll do is that they'll contract workout to freelance designers and you could be one of those even if you're a student now incidentally and you might not know this um being a designer was actually my highest income skill back when I was at medical school cuz I was working as a freelance designer for various medical tech companies there were these companies that wanted to design like medical Tech products and I knew how to do web design and product design and I taught myself app design by watching some YouTube videos about it and so I was being paid 100 an hour to do freelance app design and web design for these med tech companies and I targeted med tech companies because I was a medical student so who do you think they'd want to work with more would they want to work with a random designer that doesn't know anything about medicine or would they hire someone who's literally a medical student who understands medical stuff and is also a designer on the side they probably go with a person who has a little bit of Industry experience and so it was fairly easy for me to get those gigs had I tried to email apple and say hey let me be a designer for you guys obviously they won't even reply to me but I wasn't trying to Target the apples of the world cuz that would just be dumb I was targeting targeting is a weird way to say it but I was reaching out to people I knew through my network and doctors in my hospital and stuff when I would find that they were working on some sort of med tech product which often well not often but like quite a lot of them were now if you're looking for resources to how to learn design as a skill I would recommend the YouTube channel for Abby conic she is a fulltime graphic and brand designer she didn't go to university she taught herself the skills she was working at this Resort company for four years and she got lots of experience built a portfolio and how she does YouTube videos and stuff where she teaches people how to become designers so if you're interested in that if you if you feel like you have a reasonable aesthetic sense and you might want to learn how to use figma and canva and Photoshop and stuff those are very very high income skills provided you're selling them to the right business all right High income skill number four is being a website builder now this didn't used to be a high income skill back in like 2008 2009 when I first started dabbling with web design being a web designer or a web developer was actually a fairly low-income skill probably I was targeting the wrong clients cuz as I think about it I was Dumb and I was advertising myself on freelance websites which means I was finding people and business businesses who were trying to get people for like $5 $10 and so I was charging $5 $10 for website design that's not how I would go about it if I was a little bit more intelligent being a web designer again what does every business need every business needs a website so it's similar to The Graphic Design stuff but being a web designer and developer if you can do both of those things you are a bit of a unicorn a bit of a diamond in the rough now if you've seen my videos before you might have heard me mention who a guy who is now a friend of mine his name is Henry Henry taught himself web design a couple of years ago in about six months and decided to go all in on being a webflow designer and a developer webflow is an app an online software thing that lets you build websites it's like way more involved than something like Squarespace um but there's loads of tutorials on how to use webflow another example of a good tool is framer if you are a very good framer designer you can probably make loads of money and you can of course host your website on hostinger as I mentioned earlier so Henry taught himself web design by basically following YouTube tutorials and tinkering around for about 6 months and then he was able to charge thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to businesses to design websites for them Henry is also very good so he designed the website for my book fgood productivity.