COVID-19: Online jobs and tech skills every Ghanaian must acquire now

Online jobs and tech skills have become more valuable than ever in our changing world. Online Jobs and workers are the less affected people today as the world battled COVID-19. When hotels, schools, and many businesses and employees are struggling, online businesses have seen an upward surge in sales and profit.

This means that apart from business needing to have an online presence, individuals like you reading this article need to gain, improve, and learn IT related skills and professions going forward. This will serve as your groundbreaking add-on skill and secure you new jobs and additional income. Whiles many have thousands of followers on social media, only a few turn them into sales and profits.

To remain relevant, earn online, and get new streams of income, you have to be able to provide some form of service online. Just take a look at all the YouTube channels out there, all the blogs and websites like Ghanaweb and NewsGhana24, online shops like Jumia and Alibaba. They have all leverage on IT skills and knowledge to be where they are. Do not be deceived, the road to the top is not a fast-paced one but one akin to a woman being in labour.

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Many online workers have been working from home and are used to self-imposed lockdowns of many days and hours just to complete tasks online behind closed doors.

The reality is that many guys with online jobs and tech skills earn higher per hour than the average worker who goes to work for 8 hours. Such persons are still at work while many have had no option but to stay home and wait for the lockdowns and coronavirus to leave.

Whiles waiting for the lockdown and the virus to disappear, you need to start thinking of how you can leverage on the basic IT skills you have or learn one and build a new wave of income and job out of that.

Below are a few online jobs worth knowing about.

Online Tutor 

This job pays an average US salary of  $13 to 20/hour. Online Tutor job is a great online Jobs and tech skills worth having. Useful links to explore are Tutor.com and Wyzant . This is good for teachers as the demand for such services is on the increase. There are many students out there who must be taught from home online even before coronavirus came. Teachers can research on this and take advantage of the opportunity now.  Today, doctors, nurses, lawyers, and project managers work online.

 Social Media Manager

When I went from one training session to the other a few years ago, I did not realize the valuable capacity I was building with all the digital marketing training. Today, businesses in all sectors, governments, and government agencies are employing persons with a digital marketing background to work from home. What are you waiting for with all the many followers on Facebook, Twitter, and the rest? You can convert them into sales and profit with any product. Organizations are hiring persons with huge followings for the same job. Get this skill and you will be glad you did. Today a lot of such jobs are posted on Facebook and on Job portals.

Freelance Writer/ Blogging 

This is another cash cow that can earn you residual income. Such persons write articles for websites and get paid for the service. However, for many bloggers, the passion to go into blogging came as fun and love for writing and sharing ideas but soon, they realize the business side of it as businesses called to place their adverts on your site. Some websites charge between GHS2000 and GHS6000.00 for three months, adverts placed on their sites. Imagine such a site gets 5 of such advertisers placing their adverts throughout the year.  Fiverr.com is one place you can start providing freelance service starting from $5.00 per article you write.

Freelance Web Designer

This is another gold mine. Every serious business or company needs a website. The easiest way to earn from this is to learn the act of developing responsive websites. If you sit down and tell yourself you cannot learn this, you are deceiving yourself. With a few days of beginner lessons, you will begin to appreciate the importance of this skill and you could build your biggest business out of this. It took 6 weeks to learn to develop websites in WordPress. You can do this. You can also earn good income by developing websites on  Fiverr.com. If you combine the learning of how to blog, do digital marketing and design websites, you are on the path to great fortune.

Graphic Design 

This is another perfect source of income for online workers who design just about anything under the sun. From portals, billboards, books, magazines, logos. The list is endless. When friends were busy having fun after work or wasting time going to watch football, I took after work lessons for three months in Graphics. The story has been great ever since.  Fiverr.com and 99designs.com provide big markets where you can make good money with this skill as well.

Your current situation would have been better if you had one or two of the above skills. You see, I just invaded your house with valuable ideas and reasons why you should acquire the IT skills above. I sold my idea to you and it was not for free.

That is the power of acquiring this knowledge. The belief that online work is a crime is not entirely true and all the radio and TV stations with websites will tell you they make so much from the website news publications.

Now is the time to act. Online jobs and tech skills have come to stay. Gain a valuable IT skill before COVID-19 disappears because that skill will be handy.

Source: Wisdom Hammond | NewsGhana24.com