The skills traveller can use to gain paid work around the world – without using a laptop.

Its sound so smug doesn’t it. “ I am a Digital Nomad – I can get paid to work any where in the world” you boast proudly to the guy sitting next to you as you drink a beer in ‘Middle of no Where’ hostel. “So can I mate” the guy calmly answers back who obviously works with his hands. “The only difference is, I am one of a few people who can do the work I do for the hosts around here. As not many people with my skills come by this way. Where as what you do… from what I hear – there are a good few million people in the world that can do that for them. Not feeling so smug all of a sudden? Every one is writing about how to make money as you travel and often end up with the same answer. ‘Try you hand at travel blogging and you can make it like Wandering Earl or Marek from Indietraveller and all the other travellers who have applied themselves and made it happen’. But it seems they might be missing the point. You want to work AND travel no? You want a reason, a quest to concur to sit on that bus for 14 hours to a town you have no idea what it will be like. To help a local community, to try out some new skills or god forbid, make some hard earned cash and pay for another few months on the road. That is work and travel and having a real adventure you will tell your grandchildren. Combining your day job skills with your skills as a traveller – makes you pretty unique and in demand. I have nothing against working online…. I… um…. thats what I do and as you can see from an early post today, I plan to do exactly what the smug guy is doing. I will try not to be smug about it for sure but I think its the coolest thing to be able to work from any where in the world. My point is, don’t underestimate your value for what you have to offer. Not every hostel needs deep SEO back linking to their site. They maybe the only hostel for 200 kms and full most of the time from passing traffic, but they all need a plumber. Hostels are just a tiny section of hosts out there that need help. Schools, farms, small businesses who need help with ordering their new xyz machine off the internet. The opportunities are endless. At the end of 2014 I spoke to 1,000’s, yes 1,000s of hosts around the world asking them what skills they need. They need everything! Not one of them mentioned SEO. That’s what I did when I worked in Ad agencies in London so I would have picked up on it. They have no idea what it is. They do however need many skills that are grouped together in the following skills sets on the web site. When hosts need work doing, they post the skills they need in their profiles which then appear in the searches shown below.

So as you can see, there is a demand for skills you would not normally associate getting paid work as a traveller. Now see the order of skills offered by travellers on WorkingTraveller.com in terms of the numbers of travellers showing they have these skills in their profiles.

Tourism
Creative
Education/Language
Business
Its a tuff job but someone has to do it
Care/home support
Entertainment
Agriculture
Engineering
IT
Medical healing

By far the most is in Tourism, Creative and Teaching. Agriculture is forth from the bottom yet has more requests for work on the site than any other skill set. Travellers with Medical healing and IT skills are again less represented on WorkingTraveller.com, yet as you can see from the screens above there is certainly a need for these skills from hosts. So if you do have skills that are different from the norm and your not interested in being a travel blogger, don’t worry. You too can work anywhere in the world too. You will also probably have a bigger adventure than I will if I end up sitting in a coffee shop in Chaig Mai all winter.