Education as a commodity: Buying, selling, and making money out of education and skills
Think you’d be a good teacher, but don’t have a degree?
It IS possible to share your knowledge even if you don’t have a certification or degree — and earn some cash while you’re at it.
My wife Ana teaches Spanish in a local adult education program. She also taught a social media class, showing students how to use Facebook and Twitter. Other instructors teach students how to cook, paint, and work on their golf swing. The classes are typically two hours long, one night per week for six weeks. Anyone can design and propose a class, and get paid $20 per hour if at least five or six students sign up.
The program in Naples, Florida (where my wife works) is operated by the local school board. It’s also common for these kinds of programs to be offered by community colleges. They go by many names, including adult education, extended education, continuing education, adult learning, community education, and adult enrichment classes. To find one near you, just Google each of those names plus the name of your community or any others that would be an easy commute for you.
What Can You Teach?
You might be wondering: What do I know that I could share?
Almost all of us are experts in some area of life. If you have experience running a restaurant, you could teach a class called “Starting Your Own Restaurant.” If you travel quite a bit, you could offer a class that teaches the tricks of traveling safely and inexpensively. Just to give you an idea of what types of classes can be arranged, I Googled “adult education classes Traverse City, Michigan” (where I used to live). I found a list of classes offered at NMC, a community college with operates an “extended education,” program. Here’s a small sample of the classes offered:
- Advanced Mobile Marketing
- Italian Wine Dinner
- Birding by Ear
- Beading Basics – Make Your Own Jewelry
- Small Engine Repair: Chain Saw
- Sunrise Flow Yoga
- Easy Cheese Making
- Knitting: Beyond Beginning
- Prezi Presentations
- Solar Photovoltaic Boot Camp
- Native American Law & Culture
- Writing Your Life Stories
- Modern Buddhism: What You Should Know
- Sleeping Bear Dunes – The Big Story (with field trip)
I like that last one. It might be fun getting paid to take a group of people to a national park or wilderness area for a day!
And by the way, this is truly a small selection of the classes offered at this college. Looking over the choices available in the next three months, I stopped counting after 200. Programs near you might not be that developed, but it’s possible students are just waiting for new subjects. My 30 years of ultralight backpacking experience could be used to create a class on lightweight camping. Your experience with (fill in the blank) could be the basis of a class.
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