What Is A Portable Skill?
Portable skills are the basis that the other sections of the triad are built upon. What is a portable skill? A portable skill is a learned skill that has value no matter where or when it is plied. There are three dimensions of skill portability. The first dimension is the skill's portability in relation to locale. Can that skill be applied to tasks remotely? The second dimension is the skill's portability in relation to demand. Can that skill be easily sold to a wide range of customers or applied directly for profit? The third dimension is whether that skill can enable you to become more independent and less reliant on others. Does obtaining that skill reduce your dependence on a third party?
Portability Related To Locale
The Internet is providing humans an avenue to potentially make a lucrative income from anywhere on the globe, with as little as a smart phone and a 3G Internet connection. Many digital nomads are successful purveyors of portable skills. Their skills can be leveraged remotely, giving them the ability to work from anywhere in the world. You don't need to aspire to wander the globe as a lifestyle for portable skills to be useful. They enable you to relocate yourself and your family with little notice, during times of disaster, or political or social unrest. If your skills require you to be at a specific location every day at a specific time, you leave yourself at the mercy of local climate. Absent a large amount of wealth, you are left with little options.
Portability Related To Demand
While a particular skill may be portable in that tasks can be performed remotely, it should also be portable in regard to the demand for it. This is also referred to as a transferable skill. Proprietary skills are a huge constraint on portability. For example, if you have mastered a company’s in-house developed Customer Resource Management (CRM) tool, that has zero portability. You can’t sell that skill to someone else. Portability related to skills can also exist on a spectrum. As a personal example from the computer networking world, I have expert level knowledge and certifications in the area of Cisco routers and switches. This is much more portable than the knowledge and certifications relating to a more obscure competitor such as Extreme Networks. This being said, more obscure skill sets can potentially enjoy a higher demand and be more lucrative in certain markets, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more portable overall.
Portability Related To Dependence
We must all rely on the skills of third parties from time to time. We should sometimes seek to minimize our dependence on them, especially when our own privacy or security is a concern. While some ancillary skills cannot be directly translated to wealth or income, they can be used to support such efforts. One great example is bookkeeping or accounting. True portability of your finances might necessitate those finances being private, and thus you would need to keep track of those finances on your own rather than rely on a professional.
Getting After It
Obtaining new skills, especially portable ones, can take a huge amount of effort. Luckily, the amount of free knowledge shared on the Internet is unprecedented. If you’d like to learn to write in order to blog about your interests, there are resources for that. If you’d like to learn to code, and start participating in open source projects, there are resources for that too. You only need to take the time to find them. Doubt me? Pick a skill like coding python, and then go to YouTube and search for ‘How to code python”. Prefer books? You can fit an entire library of reference books onto an Amazon Kindle. Prefer more structured training, the likes of Skillshare, Udemy, or Pluralsight might be a good choice. No matter what skill you choose to learn, there are plenty of resources available, and many of them are free. While this all may look so easy, not many people are willing to invest the time and effort to pick up these sort of skills. They prefer to pass their time watching sports or Netflix, playing video games, or participating in political theater in between shifts at the brick and mortar widget factory.
Need A Few Suggestions?
Here are a few skills that tick the boxes in being highly portable from both the demand and locale perspectives:
- Web Design
- Software Development
- Online Training
- Graphic Design And Illustration
- Remote Systems, Network, Or Database Administration
- Copywriting
- Blogging
- Live Stream Vlogger
- Video And Audio Production
- Marketing And E-Commerce
- Podcasting
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Securities or Cryptocurrency Trading
- Bookkeeping
Both portable income and portable wealth can be derived from maintaining portable skills. In the next post, we'll describe portable income, and how the cryptocurrency ecosystem has the potential to offer reliable income streams to portable skill holders all around the world.
