How Do You Create Your Own Job: An Example

On Thursday, March 9, there was a news story on the evening news about Khan Academy (NBC News). The story began when Sal Khan started tutoring his cousin in 2004. Since he was in Boston and she was in a different city, he decided to make and post videos on YouTube so anyone could watch the videos. Later he added videos for her brothers and for people that contacted him with requests for other videos. During this time Sal had a job that he later replaced with another job. Today Sal has 2010 videos and his efforts to help others had resulted into a full time job for Sal as the director and only faculty member of Khan Academy

1.   Sal started with rendering the service of tutoring for free to a relative part time.  This tutoring was made available by video to anyone.  A website was added with tracking of the learning available br logins with Google or Facebook (Khan, 2011).

2.   Sal's audience/market started with his relative and increased to any user of YouTube because be allowed his videos to be available to anyone for free (Kaplan, 2010).

3.   Sal's employment type started as volunteer.  Today he is a full time entrepreneur of his free service (Kaplan, 2010). 

4.   Sal's compensation type is a salary from his business that is funded by a 2 million dollar award from Google and free will donations from the public (Khan, 2011).

5.   The components of Sal's job/project proposal landed him an award from Google, a website with a welcome from Bill Gates, tracking software, log in arrangements with Google and Facebook, and follow-up exercises for the video lessons (Khan, 2011).

6.   The next steps are already started by coaching opportunities for teachers to use the website with their students and plans to translate the learning materials into other languages (Khan, 2011). 

For more information, please visit the Khan Academy (Khan, 2011).

Khan, S. (2011) Khan Academy at http://www.khanacademy.org/.

Kaplan, D (2010, August 24). Innovation in Education: Bill Gates' Favorite, Fortune. Retrieved from CNNMoney.com at http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm.