{"id":161993,"date":"2017-01-11T13:00:13","date_gmt":"2017-01-11T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/premium.wpmudev.org\/blog\/?p=161993"},"modified":"2017-01-11T06:03:04","modified_gmt":"2017-01-11T06:03:04","slug":"become-wordpress-professional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/become-wordpress-professional\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Become a WordPress Professional in Your Free Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting established as a WordPress pro isn’t easy. If you want to freelance or set up a\u00a0WordPress business, you’ll need to build up a list of clients and establish a reputation for yourself. And if you’re looking for a WordPress job, you’ll need to demonstrate that you’ve got experience with WordPress and can work with it at a professional level.<\/p>\n

But all this takes\u00a0time learning and preparing, which you won’t get paid for. Unless you’re lucky enough to have an employer who’ll pay for you to learn WordPress (and give you paid time to do it), or who’ll help you learn marketing and business skills (working for a startup can be helpful), you’ll need to do it in your own time.<\/p>\n

If you’re anything like me, you can’t\u00a0afford to take time off to develop your skills or your business. When I started my WordPress journey, I had a mortgage, a preschooler and a new baby, not to mention a husband who didn’t fancy being the only earner. So you’ll need to find a way to develop your WordPress career in your own time, while continuing with your day job, your college course, or whatever it is that’s taking up your time right now.<\/p>\n

The good news is that this is possible. WordPress has a relatively shallow learning curve and there’s a vast community of experienced users and developers who you can learn and get support from, as well as a wealth of learning materials available including right here at the WPM DEV Academy<\/a>. And lots of successful WordPress pros faced the same problem, and started out by working with WordPress in their spare time.<\/p>\n

In this post I’m going to give you some tips, and call on the experience of people who’ve done it, so you can learn from their experience. I’ll also share my own experience of starting out with WordPress in my spare time.<\/p>\n

So let’s start by looking sat some of the pros and cons.<\/p>\n

Pros and Cons of Developing a WordPress Career in Your Spare Time<\/h3>\n

There are some benefits to keeping your job while you develop your WordPress career, but it’s not all plain sailing.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Upsides<\/h4>\n

The big advantage\u00a0is income. Having a day job while you develop your WordPress skills or get your business up and running means you’ll be able to pay your bills. For me, that was one of the driving forces behind choosing a career in web development, and with WordPress in particular. My job was threatened with redundancy and I was\u00a0travelling a lot for work, which with a young family was far from ideal. I’d also been in my previous career for some years and was starting to feel stuck in a rut. Going back to college wasn’t an option as I didn’t have the time, so I needed to find something in which I could be self-taught, and where I could get work\u00a0without having to gain a new qualification.<\/p>\n

You’ll also have extra income, as anything you earn through your new career will be on top of your existing salary. You might decide to use this to reduce your employment hours, to invest in your new business or your personal development, or to put money away in case your new career doesn’t work out. The best thing I did was saving\u00a0the equivalent of a couple of months’ salary before making the leap to self-employment, to avoid cashflow problems.<\/p>\n

As well as an income, keeping on your day job gives you a fallback if things don’t go according to plan. If you’re not able to land that perfect WordPress job, your business fails to get off the ground, or you simply decide it isn’t for you, then you don’t have to go looking for another job – you’ve still got one.<\/p>\n

If your day job has some crossover with your planned WordPress career, there may also be less tangible benefits. If you’re establishing your own\u00a0business, you can seek out opportunities at work to develop your business and marketing skills. You may find that you have contacts\u00a0at work who can help you get clients or find a job. And you may even be able to take on some projects (possibly unpaid) that directly let you develop the skills you need for your future WordPress career.<\/p>\n

Learning in Your Own Time: Ahmed Khalifa Case Study<\/h4>\n
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\"Ignite
Ahmed Khalifa learned WordPress in his spare time and now runs a digital marketing consultancy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Ahmed Khalifa runs Ignite Rock<\/a>, a digital marketing business. He was inspired by WordPress when he started to develop some personal projects, so started teaching himself in his spare time:<\/p>\n

“When I got home from uni or work, I started to experiment with the WordPress backend. Categories, widgets, security, plugins, etc… they all took time to learn but that’s how it all started around 11-12 years ago, albeit on a part-time basis.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0Downsides<\/h4>\n

When you get home at the end of a hard day, the last thing you want to do is start work all over again. You’ll have to be disciplined and self-motivated. I established a routine of starting work after my kids went to bed. I wouldn’t pause to boil the kettle or chat to my husband – as soon as I shut their bedroom doors, I would head straight for my desk. Some evenings I would do a couple of hours work, other times I’d be up till 1am meeting a client deadline. If I had to be on a train the next morning, that wasn’t fun. But at least\u00a0my kids learned that when I was working, they were expected to sleep – something which has had a positive impact on their sleep patterns as they’ve grown up!<\/p>\n

There may also be some professional conflicts. If you’ll be competing with your current employer in the future, be careful you don’t cross any ethical boundaries. Take care not to actively encourage your current employer’s clients to switch to your startup. If they actively seek you out and want to move that’s great, but tread carefully and don’t have any conversations until you’re about to leave your old job (or better, have already left it).<\/p>\n

You also need to check whether you’re restricted from working at another job. If all you’re doing in your spare time is developing your WordPress skills (maybe with some side projects) that’s fine, but if you’re working freelance or taking on clients, check that you can.<\/p>\n

Another potential problem is availability. I ran my agency for a year while still working part time, and it meant I wasn’t as available for my clients as I would have liked. I had to time meetings to coincide with days off, or book a day off, and I had to be careful about taking calls during work hours. I worked from home for some of the week, which made things a bit easier. But it made it harder to present a professional face\u00a0to my new clients.<\/p>\n

And don’t use\u00a0equipment provided by your employer for work relating to your new career. I bought myself a second phone, and also invested in a laptop. This cost money but meant I didn’t risk breaking any of my employer’s contractual or\u00a0security rules, and also meant that I still had all my files, call records and contact details when I left. If you use a computer that belongs to your employer\u00a0to do client or freelance work, then that data belongs to your employer – not something your clients will be happy about!<\/p>\n

But if you can cope with the fatigue, the feeling of being torn in two and the juggling act of managing two careers, then it can be a great\u00a0way to get started.<\/p>\n

It Takes Time: Michael Oglesby Case Study<\/h4>\n
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\"Michael
Michael Oglesby has written about how he learned WordPress<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Michael Oglesby<\/a> is a freelance front-end developer who is entirely self-taught. When he quit his civil service career for WordPress\u00a0freelancing, he had a lot to learn:<\/p>\n

“I have to admit, it was a massive learning curve; it was very frustrating at times as well, but\u00a0I enjoyed it. \u00a0I eventually installed my own instance of WordPress on my hosting server, but it took me a lot longer to install than the claimed \u20185 mins<\/a>\u2018!\u00a0WordPress\u2019s main programming languages are PHP and MySQL and these were totally new coding languages to me, so I had to learn on the go as\u00a0well.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Making it Work as a WordPress Professional<\/h3>\n

So, becoming a WordPress pro in your spare time isn’t easy. But there are things you can do to make it easier:<\/p>\n