7 High-Income Skills to Learn for Better Pay (2026)
Trying to make the most of high income skills learn? You are in the right place. Below we break it down in plain English, with practical tips you can actually use.
Key Takeaways
- Share This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, advisory, or brokerage services.
- We may earn compensation from some links on this page.
- We analyzed trends and research across dozens of sectors to identify the most important high income skills to learn. Specifically, we...
We analyzed trends and research across dozens of sectors to identify the most key high income skills to learn.
Specifically, we reviewed reports and research from Microsoft, LinkedIn and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
From there, we looked at what thought leaders like Tyler Cowen (an economics professor at George Mason University) and Naval Ravikant (a well-known founder and angel investor) have said about emerging high income skills.
Table of Contents
ToggleThe Two Traits Every High Income Skill Has
Defining high income skills as those that allow you to earn a six figure salary, two traits shared among each skill on the list below are:
- Leverage. The skill creates long-term value for the work performed upfront.
- Multidisciplinary. Each skill requires knowledge from two or more areas to excel.
Naval Ravikant recently said,
Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.
He continues….
The most interesting and the most key form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.This is the new form of leverage. This was only invented in the last few hundred years. It started with the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding. Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.
While leverage is about creating value, multidisciplinary thinking is about combining two or more above-average skill sets from seemingly unrelated fields.
For example, a growth marketer excels not simply because they understand the technical side of an advertising platform like Facebook Ads, but also because they have a deep understanding of human psychology that allows them to take their skills to any digital marketing channel.
7 Emerging High Income Skills to Learn
Today’s ideal employee has a combination of highly-valuable soft skills and hard skills.
Soft skills , like leadership and creativity , are all about how you work.
Hard skills are all about the work you actually do , e.g., search engine optimization or computer programming.
Over time, you need to build both. But when looking to get hired, hard skills help you stand out from the crowd.
Here are the most key hard skills for earning a high income, based on our research.
#1: Computer Science Skills
Workers more and more will come to be classified into two categories. The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?
, Tyler Cowen in Average Is OverThere’s a lot that falls under the umbrella of high income computer science skills, including software development, app development, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
But stepping back and examining the quote above, what these skills have in common is that they allow you to work intelligently with machines.
When you can program a computer to do something that repeatedly creates value for others, you’re generating value effortlessly.
And, right now, this is a very highly-paid skill to have.
What’s the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%?
So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life. Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; Maybe even 100:1.
Recommended resource: Learn the basics of computer science in a free Kahn Academy course. For more advanced training, edX , a collaboration between MIT, Harvard and other top schools , offers additional free courses on computer science.
#2. Copywriting
There are ways to leverage your knowledge in our fast-changing economy beyond coding. In fact, there are a lot of things computers are far from being able to do well.
Tyler Cowen, who we quoted above, expanded on his idea that one must know how to work intelligently with machines in an interview with Harvard Business Review:
[…] People who can bridge that gap between technical skills and knowing some sector in a way that’s more creative or more intuitive, that’s where the large payoffs will come.
[…] For people who are not technically skilled, marketing, persuasion, cooperation, management, and setting expectations are all things that computers are very far from being good at. It comes down to just commu
Final Thoughts
Before you check out, double-check high income skills learn against current offers and any coupons you can stack. Small habits like this add up to real savings over a year.
Originally published at thewaystowealth.com.
R.J. Weiss
Our editorial team researches and verifies every money-saving guide before publishing. Editorial policy · About us
