Is there any job which I can learn in 9 months and work online as a high school student?

During my first year of college, I made the slightly risky decision of looking for online copywriting or caption-writing jobs to earn some extra money. I type pretty fast and can type without looking, and honing that skill to be above average is only really useful for certain tasks that go beyond keyboarding class in high school.

In my experience, I signed up to be a copywriter online for Ai-Media, a video caption provider company that allows people to order closed captioning and transcriptions for all types of video clips. When I say spare change, I really mean spare change. A 15–20 minute video transcription might get you a few dollars, and most videos are compilations of 6 or 8-minute clips that might get you 1 or 2 dollars. For someone like me, who would only go on whenever I had some free time and felt like busying my brain, I might get 10 dollars in a week at maximum. The only way to really make a sizable profit off of that job is to slave over transcriptions all day.

The process of captioning a video when you can’t type faster than the person is speaking is tedious, and often times the only available clips to transcribe are completely unintelligible. For these reasons, it is not really a surprise that the company has very low ratings from former employees who argue that the company made it impossible for them to make a steady income. This isn’t a job you put on your resume.

One job that I often saw but did not participate in was customer service phone jobs. Some companies will look for employees who will serve the full purpose of answering phones, calling or following up with customers, sending emails, and other communications tasks that are tedious for higher-level employees to spend time on. For this, you will need a good and pleasant English-speaking voice, a very good internet connection, and a free schedule… but you might also need your GED.

Building a Strong Portfolio

Another thing you could do is try to establish a good portfolio on social media, clean-looking professional pages, with good followings such as photography pages or anything that shows your skill in digital influencing. They might be rare, but there are definitely internships and part-time or full-time remote jobs wanting a social media marketer for a business just to have somebody posting a steady stream of content and advertisement.

According to A.J. Fields, getting certifications in certain software can take you a long way. You can definitely find courses to teach you the software completely online, but in order to get the official certification, you have to go to a school and take a specific course and exam. However, even without the certification, building up your experience or proficiency in software may be able to land you an online job. For me, I learned graphic design software in high school such as Adobe Suite and GIMP as well as more basic software like Microsoft Office programs Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc. I don’t have a certification in Adobe Illustrator, but I do now have over 5 years of experience with it as well as a large portfolio just through the process of learning and using it.

Freelance Opportunities

With graphic design or any kind of creative skills, you can do freelance work if you use some social media skills to advertise and follow through well. You could do this independently or also work for sites like Fiverr, which let you do small tasks or projects for people for 5 dollars or more. Mostly, this includes things like making logos, websites, music translation, animation, or coding, or even some more silly tasks just for the sake of comedy.

Starting Now Is Key

I would say you should probably let go of the whole “9 months and in high school” thing if you want a job more serious than being a caption writing mule. Ultimately, the chances that you are going to land an online job with a flexible schedule as a qualified and certified adult is hard enough as it is. But that is no reason not to start building up your skills and experience now. You’re in the best time to start. Good luck!