Enhance Your Skills and Earn: The Tested Route to $150/hour from Home - Side Hustle Nation

      Side Hustle Nation is focused on enhancing your personal profitability. To achieve this goal, we frequently collaborate with companies that align with this mission. If you register or make a purchase through one of our partner links, we may receive compensation—at no additional cost to you. Learn more. Here’s a reliable route to earning $150 an hour from home. Perhaps you enjoy your current job, but as you look ahead, it seems your salary potential is limited, bureaucracy is overwhelming, and opportunities for advancement are scarce. Eventually, it dawns on you: this path won’t lead me where I want to go, and change won’t occur unless I initiate it.

      For Hermela Felten, she forged a new path that offered better pay and significantly more time freedom, and she's here to share her experience. Hermela operates easeintoearnings.com and Feltech Digital Solutions. A few years ago, she worked as a college advisor in the DC metro area, spending 2.5 to 3 hours daily just commuting. When COVID made her work remote, she suddenly reclaimed about 2.5 hours a day, and that small taste of freedom sparked a transformation.

      Listen to Episode 749 of the Side Hustle Show to discover: how to acquire a high-paying, in-demand skill for free, how networking can help you bypass the job application queue, and how to transform that new skill into your own part-time freelance venture. (Wondering if a pivot to Salesforce could be feasible for you? Participate in a free 5-day challenge: sidehustlenation.com/salesforce)

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      Why She Made the Switch

      Hermela cherished her job, but her college salary was capped at roughly $53,000. Raises were contoured by the departmental budget, and advancing often meant waiting for someone else to retire. She had been tuning into financial independence podcasts such as ChooseFI, which promotes a straightforward concept: be mindful of the gap between your earnings and your spending, then invest the difference.

      Hermela was adept at keeping her expenses low; the issue lay with her income. Then she came across the story of Bradley Rice, who transitioned into a Salesforce career and achieved financial freedom much more swiftly. She realized she could also make the same transition and stop permitting her income ceiling to restrict her.

      How She Gained Initial Momentum

      Hermela's shift into Salesforce wasn’t a monumental leap. She was already involved with Salesforce at the university, and her role as an academic advisor was quite similar to that of a consultant.

      Upskilling for Free

      Salesforce presents two options: work within a single organization or consult for many. Consulting aligned best with her abilities. She learned the technical aspects at no cost on Trailhead, Salesforce’s training platform, and completed a 12-week boot camp to gear up for the administrator certification.

      Her guiding principle through this journey was: “focus on what you have.” Nearly every skill you possess is transferable.

      Networking Beyond Applications

      The major breakthrough was networking. Rather than applying randomly, Hermela publicized her transition on LinkedIn. She would reach out to individuals at organizations she admired with a personalized message, highlighting something specific about them, and concluding with a request for a brief chat.

      She concentrated on hiring managers, directors, and some peer-level contacts—those who could genuinely open doors.

      Three Offers Before Certification Completion

      That outreach proved effective. Hermela received three job offers even before completing her certification; each was contingent upon its attainment and all came via networking rather than blind applications. She declined a project manager position at a consulting firm, opting for something more technical, and accepted a Salesforce admin role working with nonprofits.

      It offered $73,000 fully remote, an increase from her prior $53,000 college salary. Keeping her skills in demand remained crucial, so she continued to refine her abilities, integrating Salesforce with AI.

      The Six-Figure Opportunity and a Daring Request

      About six months later, a former networking contact returned with an enticing offer: $105,000, nearly double her previous salary. However, Hermela valued time just as much as money, so she posed a bold inquiry: would they consider a 24-hour workweek instead of 40? They agreed and adjusted her pay to approximately $63,000.

      With minimal expenses and no commute, that was still a favorable outcome, freeing up two workdays each week for her to develop her own venture.

      Establishing Her Own Freelance Business

      Those two extra days were converted into a freelance consulting business