Can YouTube help you professionally?

Many people start on YouTube while they still have a full-time job. They dream of making it big and work tirelessly to become financially free, with the goal of YouTube becoming a sustainable business that will replace the income of their day job and offer freedom to escape the 9 to 5 grind.

What I’ve come to find is that you can learn just as much about yourself by making youTube videos as you can about the actual process of making YouTube videos. I have taken the viewpoint that, not only can these things help me learn to make better videos and tell better stories, but also align nicely with the skills needed in professional life.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a generation of kids who make the choice to become entrepreneurs and skip college due to the now astronomical expense and what in my opinion is a cost that may no longer have a payoff. But what happens if that generation ever finds themselves wanting to join the work force? I’d argue they are more prepared than I was coming out of college. 

Through this process I’ve learned new forms of communication, found a sense of confidence and flexed some critical thinking muscles to help solve problems in an out of the box way. 

Communication

You’d think making videos would just teach you verbal skills, but connecting thoughts together ahead of time in a rough draft in written form, you get the full package of understanding what you are communicating, from the inception of the thought, to the words spoken on camera, all the way through the edit, where you may cut out parts that are just not relevant or weren’t delivered properly.

Clarity of the messaging is also important. You are reaching people you don’t know and who don’t know you. The goal is to be as clear and concise as possible. I liken this to meetings with executives, delivering high level messages, that you would adjust based on your audience. You aren’t going to present the same information in the same way to the working level team as you would the CEO of the company. 

You also get to think about how if you just made a 10 -20 minute video explaining a topic, how you can condense these thoughts down into a 30 second reel for short form content as well. Finding THE most important thing in a video of hundreds of words takes practice. Trying to re-format your thoughts that were created to be delivered in one way and condense them to bite sized chunks is also a skill you need in the professional world.

Confidence

Confidence is key in life. It applies to all aspects, including your professional career. Putting yourself in front of the camera takes incredible courage and also helps to develop your confidence over time. Leaning into your true self and not a character that you play on the internet, can be confidence inspiring. Seeing yourself improve over the weeks or months in front of the camera will snowball into other aspects of your life. You will have critics and learn to see the forest from the trees, learning what feedback is honest and valuable and which trolls you can ignore.

This confidence also comes with the immense amount of skills that you will learn and have to teach yourself when you start a YouTube channel. You are the director, editor, actor, sound design, promoter, community manager, etc. Just another thing that is true as well in the professional world. Even though your title may say only one thing, we all do more than one simple task at work, learning to adapt and wear different hats is crucial.

Critical Thinking

Lastly critical thinking and decision making is such a hard skill to teach, but is easier learned by doing in my opinion. One could argue that engineering schools is four years of developing critical thinking skills through various course topics. On your page you have the ultimate freedom to decide on every little detail. Spending too much time on one thing, means not getting something else done, so prioritization and time management are just as important on YouTube as it is in a corporation. Making sure you are working on the right thing at the right time, to have the highest impact. 

You get to choose, “How do I want the visuals to look? How can I represent this visually instead of just explaining it? What value am I providing? Is this story driven content? Entertainment? Education?”

The amount of planning that goes into a video is amazing. Brainstorming ideas, titles, thumbnails, finding inspiration, coming up with a draft script or bullet point outline. Figuring out how to create a process that your brain understands, such that you create your own standard operating procedures. Oh look at that, guess what the professional world does too? Exactly this, they call it Standard Operating Procedures.

The number one thing that I’ve learned is, it really isn’t as easy as it looks. Making good content is hard work and requires a tremendous effort, often times for no up front pay. Those who have gotten monetized have likely thought about quitting on the way to their success. I have a greater appreciation for the whole creator economy now that I’ve taken a stab at doing it myself.