The word “side hustle” implies that this is work done on the side or in addition to a larger priority. For stay-at-home parents, a side hustle is work that may be done while caring for children. Parenting-friendly side hustles are flexible in terms of location and time, allowing you to work from home while managing school calendars, napping patterns, and other child-rearing chores. A side hustle provides extra revenue, hands-on work to keep your career moving forward, and the opportunity to retain contacts with professional peers.
How can you find serious, compensated, professional job while still having time for your parental responsibilities?
Here are five side hustles for stay-at-home moms and dads that you can explore for that extra coin much needed in these economic times.
5 Side Hustles for Stay at Home Mums and Dads
1. Work For A Previous Employer
Previous employers are familiar with you, and they hope to enjoy and trust your work performance. So, if they have an opening and know you’re looking for work, prior employers may be the easiest to persuade to hire you. This gets you working faster than looking for a job with strangers.
I deliberately did not specify a specific job, instead offering a generic advice to work for a previous company. Instead of focusing just on your prior roles, identify areas where the firm requires your skills. When you approach prior employers, you are selling them on your shared history – because you already know the company culture, processes, and possibly even key colleagues and clients, you can jump in and contribute right away.
Previous employers can contact you for seasonal help, additional hands on a project, or other ad hoc assistance, which you can tailor to the location and time flexibility you require.
2. Share Your Specialized Expertise
When you reflect back on your career, former jobs are merely one asset you’ve accumulated throughout time. You’ve also gained specialized skills, such as industry knowledge (e.g., financial services, media), experience with a specific company size (e.g., Fortune 50 companies, fast-growing startups), or relationships with specific sorts of clients (e.g., government agencies, nonprofits). You could be an invaluable consultant or counsel to employers who require your skills.
For example, one coaching client, who had held several mid-level management positions with large pharmaceutical corporations throughout his career, started a side business advising smaller biotech startups on how to partner with Big Pharma.
Another coaching client, who had extensive project management experience as an internal auditor, leveraged her skills in hiring and team building to launch a career coaching side hustle for project analysts on how to be recruited.
3. Use General Skills Desirable In A Range Of Jobs
Your marketing expertise may have been focused on partnerships, but on a daily basis, you developed your research, writing, client management, and other general abilities required in non-marketing employment. If you choose, target opportunities in your field, but also consider jobs outside of your previous industry and functions. Because your ultimate aim is a side hustle that allows you to be a stay-at-home parent (e.g., remote, compatible with your time available), cast a wide net to find jobs that meet the parenting-first requirement.
Instead of solely looking for marketing chances, consider research employment, writing projects, client-facing roles, or other positions that need your skills. Whether or not they work in a marketing department or for a company that places an emphasis on marketing. By taking into account your overall talents rather than just previous titles or related responsibilities, you significantly broaden your possible job market.
Think about your top skill (e.g., research) and then think of industries (e.g., consulting firms, think tanks, manufacturing/ R&D facilities, universities) that leverage that expertise. As you browse relevant job pages for more information on the types of opportunities that focus on research, you’ll gain a better understanding of certain titles and keywords for future queries.
4. Tap Your Natural Talents
Does organizing come naturally to you? Do you naturally gravitate toward numbers? Do you have an approachable personality that gets along with everyone? Consider professions that use your inherent talents for organizing, working with figures, interacting with people, and so on, just as you would highlight broad skills from your history.
If you’re that relationships marketer, you might have a special superpower: working with people at all levels and with a variety of personalities and temperaments. Consider any people-facing position, whether connected to marketing or not (e.g., customer service, inside sales, survey taking). If you’re not sure what your superpower is, consider what comes naturally to you but others have to strive at.
Consider what friends and colleagues ask you for advice on; they’re revealing what you’re known for.
5. Create a job around your interests.
Parenting is difficult enough without adding additional duties that you may or may not enjoy. If you’re concerned about having the mental or emotional bandwidth for a side business, choose something you already enjoy doing. If you enjoy books, look into careers with publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, and other book-related businesses. whether you know any authors, ask whether they are looking for a researcher, copyeditor, or even a personal assistant, depending on your talents and experience.
Building a job around your hobbies, like starting with your abilities or natural talents, broadens the universe of available opportunities, regardless of your past professional background.
You’re not just thinking about what you did in the past, but also about what you enjoy doing right now. Then, brainstorm all the numerous ways you can offer (for example, your existing talents and expertise, as well as what you’re willing to learn), so you may identify multiple opportunities to get engaged with something you currently enjoy doing.
Read also, Best ten work from home jobs in Kenya
Conclusion: 5 Side Hustles for Stay at Home Mums and Dads
If you are a stay-at-home parent or any other type of person, you can choose one of these side hustles to supplement your income.
