Monetize Yourself: Leveraging Your Most Valuable Knowledge with Erik Gross (3/3‪)‬ Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

What if you could increase your earnings potential based on the things you know and the things that interest you? Erik Gross, our guest this week in episode 269, shares the Most Valuable Knowledge Framework to help anyone identify the combinations of skills and interests which would be most valuable on the open market. Erik will share examples of using this framework when deciding to start The Tech Academy and the value of boot camps as a route into the tech industry for those with little work experience as well as for the career changer.

Original Recording Date: 02-17-2024

Erik Gross is a technologist, a consultant, an entrepreneur and founder, and a career coach. If you missed the earlier parts of Erik’s story, check out Episode 267 and Episode 268.

Topics – Finding Your Most Valuable Knowledge, Birth of a Coding School, Boot Camps as a Route into Tech

3:26 – Finding Your Most Valuable Knowledge



* Eric ultimately found the thing he could monetize. He had a foundation from which to work and some idea of how he learned, but Erik needed someone else’s perspective to tell him what he knew was something valuable. Maybe we aren’t highlighting the right things on our resumes. If someone doesn’t know what they should monetize, how do they find it?



* There were a number of skills Erik had such as sales, writing, managing people, electrical assembly, etc. He calls them “pockets of knowledge.” We each accumulate them throughout life through various experiences.



* “I had this huge collection of…things I was either really knowledgeable and / or good at, had been paid to do…. What I didn’t know was the relative value of each of those pieces of information…. Back in 2011 I had no idea engineers made the kind of money we make. I literally didn’t know that this thing I’d been sitting on for at that point decades was so valuable.” – Erik Gross, reflecting back on his accumulation of knowledge





* Erik remembers the feeling of elation after being hired for his first job in technology. Then for a brief period he was frustrated about not pushing himself to pursue a technology career earlier. Erik realized beating himself up was not helpful and put a stop to it.



* “…I had all these things that were passions or areas of knowledge. What was lacking was what are they worth on the market.” – Erik Gross





* Now as part of his work as a career coach, Erik helps technology workers / knowledge workers find out what their most valuable knowledge is. Anyone can go through the exercise, and the basic pattern works like this:



* Sit in a quiet place and document all the things you know about (areas that you have studied or in which you have skill, deep knowledge, or experience)

* Separately, list everything you are passionate and interested in, even if completely unrelated to the list of things you know about

* Put the list of passions and the things you know about side by side to identify relationships you haven’t previously seen

* Erik gives the example of having a passion for telling stories together with a skill of audio recording and editing as well as a passion for children and being a good parent. This combination resulted in a client of Erik’s realizing they could start a podcast focused on telling kids stories, do all the audio production, handle the creative work of crafting the stories themselves, and combine that with a number of monetization strategies.

* “But ultimately all you’re trying to find out is, ‘this intersection of passion and knowledge that I just found…is anyone paying for that in any form out on the market?’ And when you find,