This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, what's up? Welcome to a new week and a new month. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School, bringing you episode 1582, 1582. I'm so glad you're out there, so glad you're on this journey, and I hope you're taking steps to create more freedom for yourself through the form of a money-making project. That's what it's all about here.
Now, the other day, about a week ago or so, I told you a story about a physician assistant who creates his own medical Spanish course and is doing really well. He's earning something like $50,000 a year part-time. Big success there. Well, today's caller is a therapist who wants to offer his training to other mental health professionals. So how can he crack the code of continuing education licensing, or CE, or continuing development, professional development, and maybe call it something else depending on your profession or your location?
But as I mentioned in that other episode, and we've talked about it a couple of times over the years in the archives, this is a huge field. There is so much opportunity and money in this world if you work in a field that requires any sort of CE. So let's talk about it. How can you crack that code? How can our listener offer continuing education for therapists?
That question and my answer is coming right up. [Music]
Hey Chris, this is Jacob from Salem, and I started listening to the show last year. As a therapist, I'm required to take a certain number of continuing education hours every two years to maintain my license. The requirements vary by area, but pretty much everyone in the field needs to do it one way or another. I've heard you talk about building a CE business in other episodes.
It seems lucrative, especially with the fact that getting the hours isn't optional if you want to keep working. When I looked into the process of offering CE hours, getting accredited to teach other therapists, it seemed confusing, which put me off for a while. But I keep coming back to it, because it seems like the ideal intersection between my skills and something that's valuable. How can I figure out what I need to do to make this idea more feasible? Thanks for your thoughts on this.
[Music]
All right, so listen up. As I said, if you work in any kind of field that requires professional development, this sort of ongoing training, recertification, keeping your hours up, whatever it is, this is a huge market, at least potentially so. So that's why I keep calling it out for anybody who is in that kind of industry. You have to ask, just like Jacob is doing here, where does this training come from? Where does this training come from?
Who is getting paid for it? And crucially, why not me? Like, why shouldn't I be the one to do it? Especially if you have a lot of expertise and experience in this field. So normally what you need to do is crack the code, essentially.
You have to crack the code for your industry and your location, your state, your province, your country, whatever is doing the licensing, the regulation behind that field. So ask questions. Be that annoying person who asks a lot of questions. Ask your supervisor, call up the license board, look up the companies that are offering the training. Ask the trainers themselves.
Whatever you can discover about the process, how does a particular course or certification come to be? What are the requirements for that? What are the obstacles that prevent someone else from offering a similar training? Like so many things in life, this is a process that can be reverse engineered. You just have to ask those questions and kind of work backwards.
And when Jacob says it seems confusing, well, that's by design. Okay, like it protects the people and companies who are in the inner circle. And maybe in some ways that's because of quality control. Like you don't want just anybody going to offer, you know, continuing education for therapists or for dentists or physician assistants or anybody else. But it's also a question of market control.
Like it's not only about quality control, it's also about protecting the people or the institutions who are offering that training. So by deciphering it a bit, by figuring out, okay, what is the code? Maybe it'll take some time. Like in that other story that we had a week or two ago, I think it took that guy two years, you know, to get the licensing unlocked, but now he's earning $50,000 a year part-time from it. Like this is his side hustle that's bringing in $50,000 a year because he's found a way to find what Jacob referred to as that intersection between skills and something that's valuable.
Like I talk about that all the time. So I think it's worth it, at least for somebody out there. So my encouragement is figure it out, ask those questions, and then also start developing your idea simultaneously with the understanding that you may need to change it. Like start working on your course materials. Just like the other person in the story, he was working on his medical Spanish course the whole time he was also pursuing the licensing.
You might have to make some updates, but don't wait for somebody to hold your hand and say, "Here's exactly how you do it," because this is a world in which good things come to those who take action. And you could say that about a lot of things. It doesn't just apply to this particular example, this particular industry, but it certainly holds true in this case. So good luck, Jacob. Good luck everybody else out there.
Listeners, I'm always cheering you on wherever you are in the world, whatever you're going through, whatever you're trying, whatever's working, whatever's not. If you've got a question or a comment for me, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to feature them throughout the rest of the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. It's one of my favorite things. I hope to be able to tell your story at some point, and I also hope you'll come back tomorrow.
That's all for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
