Using Downtime to Upskill

March 18, 2009 in Essays, Fuck The Recession

learnFor reasons that I don’t need to explain, many people are finding they have a lot of free time on their hands these days.

If you’re out of work there are many people giving great advice on using social media and the internet to upskill yourself and get back in the game. I think this is great advice, and there are already lots of people doing it well.

If you do decide to upskill, what skills should try learn? For some people the answer could simply be improving a skill you have or persuing something you have always wanted to do but never had the time. If, however, you want to invest your time in a skill that will directly increase your employability (if that’s a word!) then you should check out the Elance blog.

If you don’t know it, elance.com is an online marketplace for professionals. You can use it to hire people for a project or to offer your services online. Each month they publish a list of the most in-demand skills. Here’s the top 10 skills that people were looking for in February. Hopefully it can help you decide what to focus on.

February Rank Skill Name Trend from January
1 Graphic Design 0
2 PHP 0
3 MySQL 0
4 Logo Design 0
5 Article Writing 1
6 HTML -1
7 Web Content 2
8 CSS 0
9 Illustrator -2
10 WordPress 0

 Click here for the top 100.