Education isn't the only factor that affects your income. Your pay is also based on the quality and quantity of your work. If you want to earn more, you can increase the number of hours you work, your output per hour, or the value of your output.
The quickest and easiest way to boost your income is to increase the number of hours you work each week. That might mean going from a part-time employee to a full-time employee. It might mean working overtime. For many folks, it means finding a second job.
Working two jobs can be tough, especially if you have young children. And some people feel like a second job is beneath them. To overcome these objections, recognize that a second job is not a life sentence. It's a way to supercharge your income for the short term.
- I know a highly-paid biologist who takes jobs at upscale clothing stores during the holiday season. She earns extra cash and gets an employee discount, allowing her to build her professional wardrobe on the cheap. After taking the computer classes I mentioned above, I found a couple of part-time gigs that put my new skills to use. For a while, I worked three jobs totaling nearly 80 hours per week. The hours were long, but the money I earned helped me pay down debt. When my ex-wife taught high-school science, it was common for her colleagues to put their summers to good use. They'd work in bookstores, act as tour guides, or even work as bartenders!
If you can't add hours to your workday, you can enhance your value by doing more work in the time you have. If you've been producing ten widgets per hours, challenge yourself to produce twelve. If you've been making forty sales calls each week, find a way to do fifty.
When you produce more, you're worth more.
In addition to increasing the quantity of your work, it pays to increase the quality of your work. This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many people go through the motions at the office every day. You'll never get ahead if you're only faking it.
It's tough to provide general advice on how to do better work. Better varies from job to job. But you know what quality output looks like for your profession. (If you don't, that's a problem you should solve immediately.)
Note: Here's a non-intuitive way to enhance the value of what you do: Change where you work. Maybe that means moving to a different position within your current firm. Maybe that means taking a job with a competitor. Or maybe that means changing careers completely. (When my ex-wife decided she wanted to make more money, she left her career as a science teacher to become a forensic chemist. Same skillset, completely different job.)
