When Steve Menking started working on Wall Street in his early 20s, he thought he found a career for life.

Instead, shortly after his 25th birthday, Menking jokes that he had a “quarter-life crisis” while working as an equities trader at SMB Capital.

“I watched colleagues my age — or younger — excelling in their careers, but it was difficult for me to see people stay in the office until 1 a.m., and think that could be my future,” Menking, 36, tells CNBC Make It. “It just wasn’t the lifestyle for me.” 

When he asked himself what kind of job would make him happy, the answer had nothing to do with banking or the stock market — he wanted to teach. 

“I worked as a teaching assistant and tutor in college and, reflecting on it later, I realized that teaching brought out a more patient, purpose-driven version of myself. It gave me a deep sense of meaning,” he says. “I felt called to teach.” 

In 2014, Menking made the switch from finance to full-time tutoring, thinking it would be an “equally meaningful, but less time-intensive” path into education than pursuing a second bachelor’s degree to become a teacher.

Ten years later, that decision has paid off — in both career satisfaction and finances. In 2023, Menking earned more than $500,000 through private tutoring, a number he’s on track to match in 2024.

On average, Menking works 20 to 25 hours per week from his home in Connecticut, where he lives with his wife and three children.

He’s built a thriving career with two main income streams: contracting with Forum Education, a New York-based tutoring agency, and running his own online business, Menking Tutoring LLC, which he launched in 2020.

“It’s been better and more fulfilling than I ever could have imagined,” he says.

Here’s how Menking left finance for a career in education — and found a job that pays six figures and allows him to work from home.

After quitting his job in finance, Menking submitted his resume to dozens of tutoring agencies in New York and created a profile on Wyzant, an online tutoring marketplace. 

He set his rate at just under $100 an hour and leveraged his Wall Street credentials to carve out a niche helping high school and college students in math, finance and accounting.

As he gained more experience and referrals, Menking increased his rates on Wyzant and negotiated for a higher rate with the agencies he worked with. By 2017, he was earning about $150 an hour.

That same year, an acquaintance, Thomas Howell, the founder of Forum Education, reached out to Menking and encouraged him to work for the agency. That’s when Menking’s earning potential “really took off,” he recalls.

After joining Forum — and its far-reaching network of schools, students and families — Menking’s earnings more than doubled, from $95,000 to $200,000 a year.

He started working online with young people all over the U.S., including students at Ivy League universities like Princeton and Yale. Most of Menking’s tutees are in high school or college.

Right now, he works with a dozen students, the majority of whom are undergraduates pursuing bachelor’s degrees in finance or a related field.

He meets with most students at least once per week to help them work through practice problems ahead of a major exam, prepare for internship interviews and “demystify” some of the more complicated concepts introduced in college-level math courses.

Menking’s current rate is about $1,000 an hour. 

When Menking isn’t working with students one-on-one through Forum, he grows Menking Tutoring LLC, which provides online test prep courses and corporate training, like coaching entry-level investment banking analysts.

Menking’s schedule isn’t consistent. During the summer months, when schools are closed, he might work between 8 and 10 hours per week, but in the winter and spring, ahead of final exams, he works closer to 40 hours per week. 

He often works nights and weekends, as that’s when most of his students are available — but he saves a few nights each week to have dinner with his family and play with his children. 

Some weeks might be more stressful than others — he might get stumped on a homework assignment or receive the occasional panicked middle-of-the-night email from a student— but overall, “being a private tutor has given me an extraordinary work-life balance,” Menking adds.

Tutoring might be a lucrative side hustle, but if you’re patient with the long hours and inconsistent earnings the job can bring, it can be a rewarding full-time career. 

“There’s no substitute for waking up every day knowing you’re serving others in a way that aligns with your unique expertise,” says Menking. “It’s a career that allows me to be creative, to serve others, and to be entrepreneurial. … I love it.”

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Jessica Jackson always dreamed of working outdoors — now, she spends most of her days 300 feet in the air, atop wind turbines. 

Jackson, 37, is a wind turbine service technician at Vestas, a wind turbine manufacturer, in Bee County, Texas, and earns $73,000 per year. 

Her job requires technical expertise in hydraulics, electrical systems, and mechanical repairs — plus the stamina to haul 50 pounds of gear up narrow ladders in all kinds of weather.

Climbing the turbine tower “isn’t as scary as you’d think,” she tells CNBC Make It. The tallest turbine on the wind farm Jackson works on is about 350 feet above the ground. It takes her less than 10 minutes to get to the top.

“Once you’re up there, you get to see the best views: You’re watching birds fly, eagles, hawks,” she says. “You get to see planes fly by. You get to see as far as you can see. It’s beautiful.”

It isn’t a career for the faint of heart. Wind turbine technicians face one of the highest rates of work-related injuries, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Yet it’s also the fastest-growing job in the U.S., with employment in the sector expected to almost double over the next decade.

“Working in this field is hard, but it’s rewarding,” says Jackson. 

Despite the high demand for wind turbine service technicians, the profession remains “underrated and overlooked,” she adds, offering untapped potential for job-seekers who crave adventure and a competitive salary.

It’s “pretty standard” for employers not to require a bachelor’s degree for technician-level positions, according to Vanessa Benedetti, Vestas’ senior director of training operations and workforce development.

“What’s more important is that you have a willingness to learn, love to tinker and can get your hands dirty,” she adds. 

While you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to become a wind turbine service technician, some jobs might require you to complete a 2-year technical program or apprenticeship. Others, like Blattner Energy and Vestas, will provide on-the-job training for new hires.

Vestas’ training covers best practices for the turbine’s electrical equipment, technical procedures like bolt torque and tensioning, as well as first aid and safety protocols.

Before becoming a wind technician, Jackson, who has four children, spent a decade as a stay-at-home mom.

After she and her husband separated in 2019, Jackson decided to return to the workforce but was worried her opportunities would be limited without a bachelor’s degree.

Her ex-husband recommended her for a job at Blattner Energy, a renewable energy contractor in northern Texas, installing tower wiring. That job introduced Jackson to Vestas, where she started working in February 2020.

Jackson enrolled in college online part-time while working as a wind tech and finished her bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of Arizona in 2022.

Her long-term goal is to become a lead technician at Vestas, a role that pays about $100,000 a year.

The median annual salary for wind turbine service technicians is $61,770; however, many earn over $90,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s one of those rare fields where you feel like you are your own boss,” says Jackson. “You get to decide how quickly you move up the career ladder and how much you earn.” 

Jackson gets to work at 7 a.m. and ends her shift by 5:30 p.m. She works five days a week. 

The hardest part of her job is the climb. Jackson has to scale a narrow, metal ladder inside the turbine and pull herself through a hatch at the top to access the turbine’s nacelle, which sits atop the tower and contains the machine’s main parts. It’s a vertical climb up nearly 30 stories.

“Cutting any corners with safety could be the reason why I don’t go home that day,” says Jackson, who wears gloves, glasses, a helmet, harness and other protective equipment on the job. “Once you’re up there, you’re in your office and ready to work. Everything else is easier.”

The job might be physically demanding, but Jackson says spending so much time outside on the farm — and climbing the towers — has helped her feel “stronger and healthier.”

Benedetti has seen hiring for technicians in the U.S. “ebb and flow” over the past decade depending on demand, production tax credits and supply chain issues. 

Right now, “we’re seeing a huge investment in wind energy technologies,” she says. Global offshore wind investment hit an all-time high in 2023, reaching a record $76.7 billion, according to BloombergNEF’s Renewable Energy Investment Tracker.

At Vestas, the average contract for a technician is about 13 years. “It’s a career that has longevity and gives people the opportunity to learn and grow within their careers, and also to stay and feel settled within their community, which is really wonderful,” Benedetti adds.

At least 2,100 technicians are expected to be hired every year over the next decade, per the Labor Department’s latest estimates, an increase driven by both new projects and the need to maintain existing turbines.

Jackson plans to work as a technician until she retires in her 70s, if not sooner.

As she climbs the career ladder — both literally and figuratively — Jackson hopes to inspire others, particularly women and those without college degrees, to consider becoming wind techs.

“My best advice would be to go for it,” she says. “I never imagined myself in this field, but I’m extremely grateful for my job and I love what I do. … You’ll never know unless you try.”

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When you’re doing a job interview, whether virtual or in person, you’ll want to follow the appropriate etiquette.

“You want to make sure that you’re making good eye contact,” says Emily Levine, executive vice president at recruitment firm Career Group Companies, “that you’re reading the room in terms of when it’s appropriate to speak, when it’s appropriate and time to ask questions.”

Levine has interviewed “thousands and thousands of people” in her career, she says, often for A-list celebrities looking for personal assistants or chiefs of staff.

Here are Levine’s best tips for avoiding her top red flags in a job interview.

To begin with, you’ll want to make sure you arrive at an appropriate time, especially if you’re there in person.

Arrive too late, and you risk missing part of your interview, wasting your interviewers’ time and making a bad impression. But “if you show up too early, it’s also too eager and might make the interviewer feel rushed,” says Levine. Ten minutes early is the “perfect” time to walk into your interviewer’s office.

“I recommend making sure that you are parked 15 to 20 minutes early in the building” as a precaution, says Levine. That will ensure you have enough time to find the suite or office number but that you’re not there long before the interview starts.

Presentation is also key.

If you’re online or in person, “don’t chew gum, don’t have your sunglasses on your head” during the interview, says Levine. These are too casual and unprofessional.

If you’re in person only, make sure you don’t come in “smelling like cigarette smoke or wearing too much perfume,” she says. A lot of people are sensitive to smell and you want to make sure it’s not uncomfortable for them to be in the same room.

You want to leave “an impression based on your experience, not the way that you’re dressed or you smell,” she says.

Finally, regardless of your professional past, be strategic about how you talk about it.  

Avoid bad-mouthing previous employers, for example, or “divulging too much information that’s proprietary or confidential,” says Levine. Especially in her line of work, some of her clients make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements. When candidates tell her they’ve signed an NDA but still proceed to divulge confidential information about a previous employer, it’s a red flag.

Regardless of how private your employer was, spilling secrets gives the impression that if your interviewer hired you and shared proprietary information, in the future, you “would most likely do the same” with them, says Levine.

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Some CEOs say work-life balance is a myth. Others swear it’s a key to their success.

Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong is in the latter category. He worked his way up from vice president of product in 2015 to leading the jobs website in 2020. With more than 500 employees under his leadership, he says he tries to limit his work during off-hours — especially in front of his two young kids.

“With [my] children, I want to lead by not having digital products all around, or being distracted by my email and text messages all the time,” says Sutherland-Wong, 44. He works five days per week remotely, using that flexibility “to be there when my kids come home from school, to be able to get offline, spend quality time with them, put them to bed and then get back online.”

If something pressing comes up, Sutherland-Wong makes a point of going to his home office — usually easier, of course, than getting in a car and driving back to a company office location — and handling the matter there, rather than answering emails and calls while with his children. “I’ve done that before [and] the kids pick up on that,” he says, adding that he does his best to keep “space” between his roles as CEO and father.

Forty-six percent of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 say their parents get distracted by their phones during conversations with them, found a March 2024 Pew Research Center report. And there’s a correlation between parents glued to their phones and children feeling stressed or emotionally detached, according to communication research published in 2022.

Specifically, when parents are distracted with their devices, their faces turn “still” — emotionless, uninterested and un-phased by whatever’s happening around them, found researchers Robin L. Nabi and Lara N. Wolfers. Children could interpret those faces as a sign that their parent is unavailable, distressed or depressed, they added.

“We know how easy it is for parents to be absorbed in their own phones, which could limit the interaction and feedback they give to their children,” Nabi, a communications professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the university’s website last year. “Kids respond to their parents. And no matter what type of content a parent may be viewing on their phone, the outward appearance to the child is a lack of responsiveness.”

Nabi makes sure all phones are put away during important family time, like at the dinner table, she said. You can do the same during homework time or at your kids’ sports games or recitals, opting to finish up work at a later time. It’ll make a huge difference in your kids’ lives, said Nabi.

“The takeaway is for parents to be more mindful of how often they are using their phones around their children,” Nabi said. “Where their eyes are sends a message to their children about what’s important.”

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Four years ago, I was struggling and wanted to make a change in my life. 

I was dealing with postpartum depression after the birth of my second child and felt unfulfilled by my 9-to-5, a higher education administration job. I was also going to school part-time to earn my master’s degree in Positive Organizational Psychology. 

I decided to start an Etsy store, selling digital products like business templates and party games. It was not an overnight success, and it’s true that being a parent meant that I had additional demands on my time and schedule — especially with two kids under the age of four. 

Today, at 36, I have a thriving living room side hustle that regularly brings in $10,000 a month or more in passive income. Here is how I built it:

About a year into trying to get the business aloft, I was exhausted and frustrated. 

I was making the products I wanted to make, but I wasn’t getting very far creating in a vacuum. I spent months posting to social media, writing blog posts, jumping from product to product, brainstorming course ideas — everything was falling short. 

When I dug into my customer stats, I was surprised to find that while the revenue was small, a series of budgeting templates I created sold consistently. 

In a moment of clarity, I remembered that Peter Drucker, the management expert, once said, “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” With my limited time, I knew I couldn’t afford to spend time on actions that wouldn’t get results. 

So I decided to stop everything that wasn’t generating revenue (like trying and failing to go viral on Instagram) and focused solely on doing what I empirically knew would make the Etsy store better.

When I started selling digital products on Etsy, I made budget planners because I was passionate about budgeting, and they were easy to create. 

However, I realized that they didn’t sell that well, because there was a lot of competition and not much demand. Over time, I learned the importance of following trends and finding product ideas with low competition and high demand. 

Today, I’m a big fan of using tools like Pinterest trends, Google trends and eRank. I’ve found the some of the best low-competition, high-demand products are niche products related to specific interests or professions. 

For example, digital planners get a lot of search but have a lot of competition, whereas ADHD planners get a good amount of search volume with much less competition. Once I understood this, my results and revenue began to steadily improve. 

I took a course about selling digital products on Etsy back in 2019 that jump-started everything. 

Thanks to the class, and studying people who were running successful stores, I realized the importance of market research and testing — before putting all my money and time into something that wasn’t going to resonate. 

Another big lesson I learned was the importance of beautiful listing images. When I first started I would put a lot of energy in my product and then I would be exhausted, so I would rush the listing images. The product is important, yes, but how you sell it matters. The listing images and the first impression buyers matter more than you may realize. 

Most importantly, as I implemented these changes, I monitored my progress and took consistent action every day. 

I would try to work six to eight hours a day developing and listing products. I would eliminate distractions and get into the zone — but I would stay flexible depending on the needs of the day. If I was holding my daughter, I would focus on learning by watching videos. When she slept and my hands were free, I focused on creating.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your responsibilities and unsure if you can pull off a side hustle, remember this: small, consistent actions lead to big results. 

In order to make the business happen, I quickly realized that I had to get comfortable asking for, and even paying for, help. 

We were able to hire a housekeeper, and my husband took care of chores like cooking meals, so all my focus could be on building the business. 

After my digital product class ended, I stayed active in our Facebook group. I posted almost every day and remained engaged in the community online. 

I stopped worrying about being annoying or asking too many questions. I just leveraged the resources I had available to me, to the best of my ability.  

My daughter was born in May of 2020. Looking back, launching the business during my maternity leave, during the height of the pandemic, was a way to feel like myself during an uncertain time. 

During my leave, I spent any free moment that I wasn’t feeding her or taking care of my family, I focused on building my business. When I went back to work, nights and weekends belonged to my side hustle. 

I know that if I had to do it all again the same way, I would. Those few months of sacrifice have continued to pay dividends, and now, I’m able to spend as much time with my children as I want. 

There’s a model in positive psychology called the PERMA model for well-being. You need all five components — positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment — to flourish. 

Working on my side hustle helped me feel engaged, build new relationships, have meaning, and feel accomplished. The positive emotion comes from seeing my labor pay off.

Reflecting now on how I built my business, I realize it wasn’t about being superhuman or having endless energy — it was about being strategic, focusing on what really mattered and not being afraid to ask for help. Now I have the freedom and flexibility I once dreamed of, all while doing something I love. 

Rachel Jimenez is an entrepreneur, professor and mom of two, with a passion for helping others achieve their personal, professional and passive income goals. She runs an Etsy store as well as a blog, Money Hacking Mama, where she shares financial wisdom and practical advice for women navigating their careers, businesses and life.

Ready to boost your income and career? Don’t miss our special Black Friday offer: 55% off all Smarter by CNBC Make It online courses. Learn how to earn passive income online, master your money, ace your job interview and salary negotiations, and become an effective communicator. Use coupon code THANKS24 to get the best deal of the season—offer valid 11/25/24 through 12/2/24.