KNOWING WHERE TO TAP: CHARGE YOUR WORTH

We all know the story of the ship worker who fixed the engine on the boat, right? For those who don’t, let me tell you the story. The owners of a large ship were having issues with their engine. It simply would not start. So they called an experienced engineer who had been fixing ships for many years. The man arrived with his tools, and the ship owners watched with curiosity and excitement as the man carefully inspected the engine for a few moments. The man then took out his hammer and gently tapped the engine on a specific part. The engine roared into life.

A few days later, the ship owners received an invoice from the man for £10,000. Shocked and angry, they disputed the invoice and argued, “How can you charge us £10,000 for something that only took you ten minutes, and all you did was tap it?” To which the man replied, “It took me 10 minutes to tap it, but it took me over 25 years to know where and how to tap.”

The moral of the story needs to be applied to e-learning content creation, LMS design, or software development. Just because it took you 10 minutes to design something shouldn’t mean you can only charge for 10 minutes of your time.

The reason it was quick and the reason it looked awesome was that you’ve spent years of your life honing your craft, in the same way a carpenter does, a hairdresser does, or any other tradesperson.

So why is it so difficult to quote and charge for e-learning jobs? A plumber can easily charge £500 for a call-out that takes 20 minutes to fix, but trying to charge £500 for an e-learning slide, logo, or code that took only 20 minutes to build, is often baulked at. And that’s because everyone thinks they can do it. They’ll pay the dentist for their teeth, and the mechanic for their car, but the e-learning guy? Well, how hard can it be, right?

You need to start charging for your worth, not what you think someone will pay. Easier said than done, I know, and when running a business, we have to be grateful for any work we get. Pricing ourselves out of a job is a dangerous move. But let’s face it, we’ve all underquoted for some work and spent far more hours on something than first expected, promising ourselves we won’t do it again…but we do.

Drawing inspiration from Casey Brown’s enlightening TED Talk, “Knowing Your Worth,” Brown emphasises the importance of communicating your value, not just expecting others to recognise it. In e-learning, this couldn’t ring truer.

An Instructional Designer doesn’t just spend hours in front of their screen randomly bashing away at keys and clicking their mouse (well, they do, but, there is more to it); they actually weave a tapestry of learning that incorporates deep pedagogical principles, known in the trade as “turning boring text into engaging content”. But they also design a brand, they pair fonts and colours, and often build a brand new UI for each project. Similarly, a theme designer doesn’t merely code; they put years of knowledge and experience into the design, the end product, in reality, has gone through over 20 years of development to arrive at a point that enables them to produce high-quality work that meets the project brief.

But here lies the challenge – how do you, like Casey Brown suggests, ensure your clients understand the worth of your work? The first thing to do is to stop undervaluing your work. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, I could do this in my sleep” or “Surely, this isn’t worth much.” Remember, your skills were not bestowed upon you at birth; they were hard-earned through experience and continuous learning. You call out a boiler engineer or go to a car garage because that’s not in your skillset. A client has come to you because the job they want to do is not in their skillset. Your ease is your expertise, and it’s valuable.