There’s always a certain scenario in life that could be the Turning point for your career.

Over a decade back, specifically in 2008, there was a global financial crisis considered by many economists as the most serious one. T’was so serious that it threatened everybody to lose their jobs, including those working for multinational companies here in the Philippines.

I was employed as a Technician in the Semi-Conductor industry back then, but the company I was working for had no exception from doing layoffs.  

Threatened of possibly losing my job, and of course, the salary I used to get month after month (I was hired on the same company in 2007) — I began looking for alternative jobs and sent applications to different job portals. I didn’t find one; fortunately, I wasn’t retrenched either until the crisis began to stabilize months later.

My Historic Online Searches

During that time when I scoured the internet for jobs, I stumbled upon a certain article that talked about “work from home”. I initially thought that won’t apply for me because I’m in the Philippines, and such work-from-home scheme usually works for countries like the U.S. And there were just too many bogus quick-rich schemes to watch out for; of course, even up until now.

But I got curious.

Since then, I frequently searched for “work from home”, or similar terms like “online jobs”.

I still couldn’t figure it out. Not until I encountered online job platforms like oDesk and Elance (now Upwork), and other freelancing sites back then. I realized, working from home was indeed possible because of such platforms. It still didn’t get me into freelancing, though. Simply because I didn’t have the right skills just yet.

Saying “Hello” to the World of Blogging

I kept on researching, a lot of reading until I stumbled upon another article that talked about “making money from blogging”.

Back then, I didn’t know writing on a certain platform was called “blogging”. I used to write blogs for a now-defunct social networking site, Friendster, just for fun. But I thought — I wasn’t making money out from it at all. LoL!

I didn’t stop right there. The curiosity in me resulted for more research, “blog hopping” as we called it, until I learned things like “online ads”, or specifically — monetizing blogs with the likes of “AdSense”!

I Googled further. And finally, I tried.

I built my first blog. It didn’t work. (I’ll talk about this on another story)

I built another one.

There were those sleepless nights of experimenting and continuous learning.

And, it took me months until I finally hit the sweet spot of making my first $100, which is the minimum payment threshold before one gets paid on AdSense. That was in 2009.

The Career Turning Point

While remained employed, I continued blogging on the sideline. It came to a point where I was making more money from my blogging endeavor than the salary I got from my full-time work.

I pursued that passion for a couple more years. And in 2012 to be exact, I quit from my job and started doing online stuff full-time.

That was my Career Turning point from being a Technician to an Online Freelancer and Tech Entrepreneur today.

What’s yours?

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