Are You Really Skilled?

Sitting at quetta dhabbas, sipping my daily KPI metric of chai, I often overhear conversations about upskilling.

Learn AI. Learn prompt engineering. Learn whatever the current trend is. The goal is always the same.

Make more money.

Since I’m based in ISL, most of these conversations involve people in IT, tech, or development. And I get it. The instinct makes sense. New skill equals new opportunity equals more income.

But my perspective, relative to where I live and what I’ve seen, says otherwise.

Just learning a new skill, especially a hard or technical skill, won’t make you any more money. Having a portfolio won’t either. Having a website won’t either.

Not anymore.

The biggest skill we lack as Pakistani professionals is the skill to sell a skill.

Quite a mouthful. But it’s true.

Now, people have started to understand this. Especially in the age of AI, more folks are realizing that skills alone don’t cut it. But here’s the problem I keep seeing.

People take “sell your skill” too literally.

They join random Discord servers and post “hey guys, I do web development, let me know if you’re interested.” They spam LinkedIn connections with pitches. They cold message strangers with service offers.

That’s not how selling works.

What Selling Actually Means

At the root of it, at the root of everything, you have to be a problem solver.

Nobody cares what tools you use. Nobody cares about your tech stack. Nobody cares how you do it or what you do it with. They have a problem. They’re scared. They need it solved.

That’s it.

Selling is two things. First, knowing how to solve the problem. Second, knowing how to make someone believe you’re the best person to solve it.

The second part is where most people fail. And it’s not one thing. It’s a combination of efforts across a lot of areas.

You need to be sales ready. That means having something to show. A website, a portfolio, case studies, something you can send when opportunity knocks.

You need to be niched. The more specific the problem you solve, the less competition you face.

This is the blue ocean versus red ocean theory. In services especially, being known for one thing beats being available for everything.

You need to be solving a problem that has demand. I see people all the time building skills for problems nobody is paying to solve. That’s a dead end.

And then there’s the opposite trap. People see competition and run away. “Too many developers. Too saturated. I’ll go into something else.”

The Demand Problem

Let’s take an example.

In Pakistan, software development is extremely competitive. People constantly ask me if they should even bother becoming a developer with AI taking over and thousands of others doing the same work.

My answer is usually yes.

High competition with high demand beats low competition with NO demand.

Take cybersecurity. Less crowded, sure. But it’s not a service-oriented role in the same way. Companies aren’t looking to hire freelancers or outsource cybersecurity work from Pakistan the way they outsource development. The market barely exists yet.

I’d rather compete in a crowded market and be exceptional than sit in a market that doesn’t exist.

The Long Game

Now, this doesn’t mean you’re stuck forever.

Markets evolve. When I started freelancing as a product manager four or five years ago, freelance PM wasn’t a thing. There were zero product management jobs on Upwork. Zero.

You know what there was? Virtual assistant jobs. Project coordinator jobs. That’s how I got my first gig. My first client hired me as a virtual assistant. Leagues apart from product management.

But I got my foot in the door. I worked my way into PM-adjacent work. I positioned myself as someone who could bring product thinking to agencies that only did delivery. And slowly, the market caught up. Remote product managers became normal. Startups got comfortable with fractional PMs. I even landed a consulting gig at Upwork itself.

The opportunity didn’t exist when I started. I created the path while the market evolved.

This is the mindset I want you to have.

Don’t limit yourself to one skill for your entire life. Don’t think so short term that you refuse to do anything except your dream role.

Let’s say you’re passionate about cybersecurity. Fine. But if the freelance market for cybersecurity doesn’t exist yet, what do you do?

Get in through web development. Find an agency that has security clients on the side. Do good work. Build trust. Then lean over. “Hey, I’m also interested in this security stuff, I’ve been learning, can I help?” Make the switch from the inside.

That’s what you do when opportunities aren’t there yet. You find adjacent paths. You position yourself for the future while paying bills in the present.

At the end

If more people focused on selling their existing skills better rather than chasing every new trend, they would end up making more money.

I’ve seen it happen over and over. Someone stops learning new things for a few months and instead focuses on their portfolio, their messaging, their outreach, their positioning. Suddenly, opportunities appear. The skills were always there. What changed was how they packaged them.

Most people have the skills already. They just don’t know how to make anyone care.

That’s the real gap.

And until you close it, no amount of upskilling will save you.

So yes. The most important skill is to sell a skill.
But more importantly, knowing what selling actually means.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

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