It’s normal to find people juggling multiple jobs simultaneously. Not only is having an extra income practical to cope with the high cost of living today, but it’s also an avenue for adults to explore opportunities for their other skills. It gives them a chance to be flexible because they aren’t stuck in one field.
Having multiple sources of income is one of the best ways to stay afloat and create your emergency fund in the unlikely event that you lose your full-time work. This can also give you financial stability and security, knowing that if one stream dries up, others continue running.
If you don’t know where to begin looking for alternative income sources or how to create one on your own, here are a few suggestions that you can consider. These three opportunities have varying degrees of difficulty and expertise, but you can make it in any way you want, depending on your skill level.
Create Custom PCBs on Commission
If you’re fascinated by printed circuit boards (PCBs) and how electricity flows through them to give life to electronics, then you can offer services to people who need custom PCBs for their projects or products. You can offer to provide finished products or just the designs of the circuit boards alone.
These are complicated pieces of work that need steady hands and a good understanding of the science. You can create the PCBs manually if you know how to implement your designs, but it can be expensive and not worth the trouble, especially for individual projects.
In this case, you can work with professional PCB design services that can realize your custom circuit board within a few days. They can create your prototypes based on the design that you send them so that you won’t have to make the printed circuit boards for your customers yourself.
Become a Freelance Engineering Consultant
If you like working on different projects with various companies, you can become a freelance consultant and offer your expertise in your specific field of engineering. This can also be a great income-generating opportunity for you if you love problem-solving and sorting out issues.
Companies who need engineering assistance for their projects but don’t have the skill level needed often hire freelance consultants to solve the problems for them. You can be hired to consult on a certain issue, work with their team to develop products, or lead your own team on their company site.
Working as a freelance consultant can give you many opportunities to explore what other career options you have in your industry. It can be a great way to improve your skills and gain additional knowledge if you are exposed to different situations as you work freelance.
Develop SaaS Products
If you’re fond of creating software for fun, you can turn that into something profitable and helpful for other people in your industry. You can identify a prominent problem in what you do for a living and create a solution for it.
Once you develop a software as a service (SaaS) product and offer it to users for a competitive subscription price, you’ll be welcoming passive income that will continue to flow without much effort. Of course, that would mean that your product went through rigorous testing and implementation before it hits the market.
This is a great source of income that won’t cost you much in development because you won’t have to buy or maintain expensive hardware. You can also reach a bigger audience and, therefore, more potential customers because your product uses cloud computing software that is accessible.
There are a lot more opportunities that you can take on as an engineering graduate who is looking for an avenue to practice your skills. If you know how to maximize the potential of your existing network of connections, you can be exposed to a bigger industry.
You can also search the internet for possible inspiration, guides on how to establish a software service, or learn new skills that you want to study. The internet is a great place to further your knowledge and connect with experts in your field.
But the most important thing that you have to remember when you’re balancing multiple streams of income is that you can’t take more than you can handle. Keep in mind that you’re juggling these with your full-time day job, so you need to manage your time properly to achieve this flexibility. You can’t let that aspect of your life falter because then you’ll be missing the entire point of having other jobs.
