Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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> I told people to at least try to learn x, because their job would become much easier and they'd get more money. Nope, not interested

How much more money? I'm frankly not sure there is any skill you can learn on your own (without full-time commitment and/or paid formal education) in a reasonable time that would make financial sense for a typical 50k/year office clerk to learn, at least not in the UK.

The closest to this would be software engineering, but even then, it would take you ~10 years of experience to reach the level of a proper senior software engineer, and even that only gets you 80k on average in the UK - a sizeable chunk of which will get stolen by the taxman.

10 years of effort starting from scratch to not even be able to double your salary (and again, the net salary is even smaller, as taxes increase) is not a winning strategy. You're better off bullshitting and playing office politics to move up in the pecking order at your current company and increase your salary that way.

I offered people working in a call centre environment to learn crm administration: gradually, with all the support they may need, etc. We would have transitioned them into new roles once they gained some knowledge. The pay in new roles would have been higher than they'd ever get in the call centre environment.

There are lots of things people can learn in a relatively short period of time that would benefit them. It may not be financial reward at first, but being able to draw the necessary insights, do things faster and more efficient are beneficial the many.

In general, this isn't about an accountant picking up software engineering on the side. But there are a ton of adjacent skills/knowledge in jobs that you can pickup in maybe a day or two or hours here and there on the side--not necessarily on your own time.

>I offered people working in a call centre environment to learn crm administration: gradually, with all the support they may need, etc. We would have transitioned them into new roles once they gained some knowledge. The pay in new roles would have been higher than they'd ever get in the call centre environment.

one thing to consider is that they may have been bitten by this kind of talk before, possibly at the jobcentre. "go on this training course, you'll get a new role with higher pay" -> then it just never materializes. or they get more responsibilities piled on, but the higher pay mysteriously never arrives. so apathy sets in.

It's not about what you learn, but about how you apply it. The chances are, if someone's a clerk, he/she isn't really into "upskilling" in the first place. People don't ever change fundamentally, especially after they get a small taste of the economy.

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