How to get paid for your work as a young person

I was giving a keynote at Huron University, and afterwards a student came up and asked me the question I now hear more than any other.

How do I actually start getting paid for this?

I remember exactly what that felt like. Between fifteen and twenty I did work I am still proud of. Press features, some of the biggest stages I could have hoped for at that age, an initiative that reached more than twenty five thousand people.

I also had nothing in my bank account. Zero. I was exhausted, mildly resentful, and quietly confused about why doing well and being broke were happening at the same time.

The thing that eventually changed was not a skill. It was noticing that I had absorbed a rule nobody had actually told me: that if the work was meaningful, asking to be paid for it made me suspect. That rule is very convenient for everyone except the person doing the work, and it is especially common among young people doing anything with a social angle.

You are allowed to create impact and income. Here is what I wish I had known earlier.

1. Work out your rate before anyone asks

Start with arithmetic rather than feeling. How much do you want to earn in a year? How many hours a week can you realistically give? Divide one by the other.

Fifty thousand dollars a year across twenty hours a week comes out around forty eight dollars an hour. Now add the invisible hours, because a one hour talk is never one hour. There is preparation, travel, the calls beforehand, the follow up afterwards. Price the job, not the visible part of it.

Then hold the number. The most common failure is not charging too little, it is having no number at all and improvising one under pressure.

2. Change the word cost to investment

This sounds like a semantic trick and it changes the conversation more than it should.

"I cost five hundred dollars" puts you in the same mental column as printing and catering. "This is an investment of five hundred dollars, and here is what you get" puts you next to the outcome they are trying to buy.

Same number. Completely different frame. You are not a line item on a budget, you are the reason the budget exists.

3. Get specific about the problem you solve

People do not pay for how impressive you are. They pay because something is broken and you can fix it.

So work out what you fix. It might be your lived experience of something the organisation is trying to reach. It might be that you can talk to an audience they keep failing to connect with. It might be that you are fluent in a platform their whole team finds baffling.

The more precisely you can name the problem, the easier the price conversation becomes, because you are no longer negotiating about you.

4. Make the offer easy to say yes to

Put together something they can look at and forward to whoever approves spending. A short deck or a clean PDF that explains what you offer, what it includes, and what it costs.

This matters more than it seems. The person who wants to hire you often has to convince someone else, and if you have not given them anything to work with, they have to build the case themselves. Most will not.

Keep it visual, keep it short, make the options obvious.

5. Have somewhere people can find you

You need a digital home. Not a beautiful one, just a real one, with what you have done, what you offer, and how to contact you.

Something simple like Notion, Carrd or Squarespace is enough to start. What matters is that when someone hears about you and searches your name, there is something there other than a locked social profile.

6. Ask the question

When someone invites you to speak, advise, contribute, or appear, ask this: is there a budget for this?

Seven words. It is the highest return sentence in this entire post.

You will be surprised how often the answer is yes. Not because people are hiding money, but because they assumed you would ask if you wanted to be paid, and read your silence as agreement to do it for free. Organisations have line items for this that go unspent because nobody claimed them.

And when the answer is no, you have lost nothing. You have just found out earlier.

7. Go and find the work

Waiting to be discovered is a strategy with very poor returns.

Make a list of the organisations, schools, and companies you would actually want to work with. Then contact them directly with something personal. A short recorded video tends to work better than an email, because it is harder to ignore and it shows them what you are like in about ninety seconds.

Do a lot of them. Follow up more than feels polite. Most of the outcome here is volume and persistence, which is unglamorous and true.

8. Know how many doors there are

Getting paid is not one thing. Speaking, workshops, facilitation, consulting, brand partnerships, building toolkits, writing, teaching.

Most people try one, find it hard, and conclude they cannot be paid for their work. Try several. The one that works for you is often not the one you expected, and it usually takes a few attempts to find out which.

9. Let people see the work happening

Share what you are building while you are building it. What you are learning, what broke, what you are trying next.

Almost every paid opportunity I have had came from someone who had been quietly watching for months before they reached out. None of them would have known to, if the work had only existed privately.

Being visible feels self promotional until you notice the alternative is being invisible.

10. Say no to free, sometimes

Exposure does not pay rent. You already know this, and you will still be tempted, because the invitation will be flattering and the person asking will be nice.

Have a test. Will this lead to paid work, a relationship that matters, or a genuine skill? If the answer is no, it is fine to decline, or to accept on different terms.

And when you do choose to do something for free, ask for something tangible back. A written testimonial you can use. An introduction to someone who does have a budget. A media credit. Name what you want explicitly, in advance, because nobody offers it afterwards.

The part that took me longest

The tactics above are the easy half. The hard half is believing you are allowed to ask.

I did work for free for five years, not because I had no options, but because asking felt greedy in a way I could not have defended if you had made me explain it. Nobody sat me down and said this. I picked it up from the way people talk about young people doing good work, as though payment would contaminate it.

It does not. Being paid is what let me keep doing the work at all, and stop resenting it.

If you are trying to get your work in front of more people first, that is a related and separate problem, and I wrote about it in how to get press for your work as a student.

Start with number six. The next time someone invites you to do something, ask whether there is a budget. That one question changed my finances faster than anything else here.