This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey friends, it's episode 2,699. I am so excited to reach another milestone, 2,700 coming up tomorrow. Thank you for being out there. Thank you for being such a part of this community. It makes a world of difference.
And yeah, we've been making this show all this time every single day. Let's get to today's focus. How can I provide continuing education services? Now I like this one because we have talked a few times over the years. We've had some case studies of businesses that have started in the continuing education world.
They can really be quite lucrative just because there are so many fields and professions that require continuing education. You have to kind of keep learning and getting these credits each year in order to keep your license or your ability to work as a medical professional or in the legal field or lots of other fields. So what about the people who provide those services? Well, they aren't cheap usually and they get paid. So we're gonna hear from Emma.
She is a retired teacher with a background in curriculum development. She wants to move into the continuing ed world. It's also called professional education, sometimes something else in different countries or regions. But she's unsure about which industries have the most demand and whether she needs specific certifications to offer these services. So let's see if we can do a little bit of an overview to help her and perhaps give an idea to somebody else out there.
Again, thank you, episode 2,699, her detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hello, I'm Emma, a retired teacher from Florida. I'm considering creating continuing education courses for professionals, but I don't know which industries have the highest demand. I'm also wondering if I need specific certifications or accreditations to offer these courses. What steps should I take to research the market and ensure that I have the necessary qualifications to launch my continuing education side hustle?
I wanna make sure I'm targeting the right areas and meeting all requirements while making a positive impact on people's careers. - Hey, Emma, let's talk about it. As I've noted, this can be a really strong industry to go into, well, it's across industries, but the continuing education industry, let's say, across a variety of fields, just because you kind of have a captive market, which may or may not be fair, but that's almost like a whole other conversation, whether professionals should have to go through this requirement all the time. And probably the answer is some of them should and some of them shouldn't, it depends on the field, but we just like to look at things the way they are, not necessarily how they should be here. So again, continuing education can be a profitable industry just because you have that captive market.
So to focus on the specific fields or topics with the highest demand, some promising areas include healthcare, like lots of healthcare, not just nurses or doctors, but going throughout all the different specialties, various admins and such, people have to maintain all kinds of qualifications. I mentioned legal earlier, education, including teachers and administrators, technology sometimes, just because so much technological change is occurring, and sometimes these things are required, sometimes they're not, right? It just depends on the field, business professionals, accounting, you know, any kind of field where certification comes into play, then often you don't just get a certificate and be done with it. You have to continue to earn or re-qualify for that. So look at job postings in your target industries to identify the most sought after skills and certifications, then go and look and see, okay, what else is available?
Like what, who is the competition? What are they offering? How did they get certified to offer the certification or the credits that can then be applied? Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner. This is a great way to see how many people are searching for topics related to your courses.
And then you're gonna have to apply through organizations directly related to the field. So it could be the American Nurses Credentialing Center, for example, or the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. It's gonna be different depending on where you live and what the topic and field is and so on, but basically you want to make sure that your course is approved for people to take and then receive credit. And then you're in a great place because then you can offer this course and you've got people potentially coming back year after year once you're in like a course catalog. And we featured a number of those people who have done very, very well, some of them building six figure businesses by doing exactly what I just described.
So obviously there's a lot of steps to it. I'm not saying it's simple or quick, but it is worthwhile for the right person. Emma, best of luck, listeners. If you have a question, comment, sidehustleschool.com. Excited to bring you many more episodes, starting with 2,700 tomorrow.
Today was 2,699. There's always notes for every episode. You can always listen wherever you prefer. It's always completely free. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
