It’s a cold Tuesday morning in December. After a long drive in your warm and cozy car—you enjoyed your favorite podcast—you finally arrive at your office.
You prepare a hot cup of coffee for you and Mandy, your colleague and best office friend. While filling in the coffee beans (their rough, chocolate aroma fills the room), you exchange insignificant news from your Facebook feed. The chat is wonderful and 100% meaningless, both of you laugh a lot.
Slowly wandering to your desk, you meet a few of your colleagues. You smile at them and they smile back.
Nobody is stressed out today. It’s not much business just before Christmas so everybody feels light and is looking forward to the upcoming holidays and well-deserved Christmas break.
Life is easy!
Standing in front of your office door, you chuckle about Mandy’s Chuck Norris kicker (“Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone”).
You open the door. Strangely, someone is already waiting for you…
It’s your boss—scrutinizing you with a grave expression on his face.
After a few moments of silence—seconds only but they feel like minutes—your boss coughs slightly, nips on his coffee (while closing his eyes, apparently enjoying its taste). Then, he hits you with the sledgehammer:
“You’re fired!”
The End
Lay-Off Statistics
This happens to millions of employees even with no fault of their own. Most employees work for private or public companies. According to the US government report, 58,064 people are “laid off” every single day—that’s a staggering 1.8 million employees in one month. In my home town Stuttgart, many of my friends work for the car manufacturer Daimler. The company recently announced to cut 10,000 jobs. Naturally, the employees fear for their ability to bring food on the table and feed their loved ones.
Why Should You Become a Python Freelancer?
First of all, losing your job is not as serious as it sounds: you can always earn money as a self-employed freelancer. In fact, this is a great backup strategy, especially in combination with your current job. If one day, your boss is dropping by with the intention to fire you, you can comfortably leave and allocate more time to your freelancing business which is already up and running.
The opportunities are plentiful and if you’re reading this, chances are that you are at least mildly interested in the booming tech and IT sector. The pay is great: expect to earn six figures (that’s when you only achieve average). There’s only one catch: it takes a few months to get started with your freelance online business. Additionally, it takes 1-3 years of focused effort to build a thriving, six-figure freelancing business.
Let me reformulate this: it takes 1-3 years of focused effort if you know what you’re doing. It takes forever if you don’t.
So how to cut the corners and give yourself a head-start into Python freelancing? The answer is simple: take a course by an expert Python freelancer who has been there and done that.
An expert Python freelancer can not only tell you how to get clients faster and with less effort, but also how to structure your business, how much time to spend for each client, how to acquire the skills faster, how to scale your business, how to satisfy clients, and how to get repeat purchases.
It’s good to learn from mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Warren Buffett
Why should you waste a year or so struggling and fighting for clients if all it takes is a simple tweak in your gig application template?
As a Python freelancer, not seeking expert advice when starting out will literally cost you tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What’s the Best Python Freelancer Course?
First, we describe the evaluation considerations we used to determine the best Python freelancer course. Second, we summarize the results in the table below.
Evaluation Criteria
We evaluated seven categories:
- Python Skills: Does the course come with extensive training material? If the Python training includes less than 10 hours of video content, we answered the question with
Nobecause you cannot acquire the high-income skill Python in a few hours of training. - Business Strategy: Does the course include business-related tips and tricks such as how to acquire your first client? While Python skills are important for your success in the Python freelancing space, it’s even more important that you develop your business expertise. As a rough estimate, business skills account for 70% of your success, Python skills only 30%.
- Training Plan: Does the course have a detailed training plan that even transcends the lifetime of the course?
- Expert Freelancer: Does the course ship with advice from expert freelancers sharing their first-hand experience? This is one of the most important criteria for a practical Python freelancer course.
- First Gig: What’s freelancing without freelancing gigs? The best courses come with your first freelancing gig from the course creator so that you can get your first testimonial to simplify the search for future clients.
- Guarantee: Never buy a course without a strong guarantee. Who likes handing a stranger your money not knowing what you will get back?
- Costs: We have chosen three cost categories: $, $$, and $$$. The first category is up to $50. The second category is up to $350. The third category is up to $1000.
Evaluation Results
These are the top six resources in the world to learn about becoming a Python freelancer in 2020.
| Course | 1.Py | 2.Biz | 3.Plan | 4.Expert | 5.Gig | 6.Risk | 7.Costs | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Udemy | ✔ | ❌ | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | 30 | $ | ⭐⭐ |
| Profit Python | ❌ | ✔ | ❌ | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | $$ | ⭐ |
| Upwork Self | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ | ✔ | ❌ | ❌ | $$$ | ⭐⭐ |
| Clever Progr. | ✔ | ✔ | ❌ | ✔ | ❌ | 30 | $$ | ⭐⭐ |
| Python Freelance | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | 60 | $$ | ⭐⭐⭐ |
All six resources are valuable on your path to success. However, the Python Freelancer course is the most in-depth, thorough one. It’s the clear winner among the best Python freelancer courses in the world.
That’s not surprising because we invested more than a year crafting it with half a dozen of professional Python freelancers on our payroll for expert advice, feedback, and even freelancer videos. Experts talk about how they solved problems for clients—it cannot get easier than that. Also, there’s a testimonial page from course members.
If you wanted to hire freelancers yourself giving you these tips, it would costs you tens of thousands of dollars.
Summary
Even if you must take our opinion as a biased one, our goal was to objectively compare all freelancer courses in existence. Six courses made it to this page and all six courses are valuable and will provide a positive ROI for your freelancing career. However, the Python freelancer course from Finxter is by far the best one in the world. In the year 2020, there’s no competition—even close. If you’re unsure, you can even join the Finxter webinar that gives you an hour’s worth of valuable Python freelancer content for free.
More important than which resource to take is to start taking action at all. If you don’t start, you won’t build a thriving freelancing business for sure. So let’s start building your future now.
While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.
To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com that has taught exponential skills to millions of coders worldwide. He’s the author of the best-selling programming books Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), The Art of Clean Code (NoStarch 2022), and The Book of Dash (NoStarch 2022). Chris also coauthored the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books. He’s a computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.
His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.