Self employment?

For many Canadians who are struggling to find work for many various reasons, the prospect of self employment is an attractive one.

I have been looking to self employment as a way to secure income, as finding employment in my current field is unattainable.

The trouble is finding what your skill sets are and are they transferable into self employment framework. If you are skilled in the trades, making the shift to being your own boss is not that difficult. You can run your business from your home and go onsite to your customers to perform the work. The set up costs are minimal.

But what if you do not have a skilled trade to switch into your own business. Can you learn something new? Take a hobby and turn it into income? Some people have taken hobbies such as baking or sports memorabilia collection into a self employment opportunity. Using EBay or other such entities to buy and sell their collections on, with the focus on making a profit. Others have turned their cooking skills into a brick and mortar business, from which they sell their goods. These are all good formats, but some of us do not have transferable hobbies which can be turned into a business. So what are we to do?

Coding! Yes it is a growing field with many opportunities.

So how does one start, especially if you have been out of school for some time now. Well thankfully there are some free websites which are educational based and offer easy to follow courses to learn the different languages of code. Codecademy is one of the best free sites to learn how to code. It's courses assume you are a beginner and walks you thru slowly all the steps for the various languages which are used to create websites and more.

While I am still learning some new languages, I have enough under my belt that I am using a text editor outside of Codecademy that I am using to write my first website which could be posted to the internet. With this tool I will be able to build sites for others for a small fee. A great start!

So look at your skill sets, give it some thought. And if coding catches your imagination then start your journey today and I will guarantee you will not be disappointed.