The resounding answer to this is “Yes”. BUT – what if you can’t seem to make it work?
There are actually a number of ways to monetize your Access skills:
- Offering your services as an Access Application developer to create, modify, and/or maintain Access databases.
Many potential customers out there either have a crazy big Excel spreadsheet that is asking to become an Access database, or an existing Access database created by a zealous employee. Finding these folks, particularly with big budgets, can be your ticket to making a living with Microsoft Access and can lead to a long time relationship / gig. Having multiple apps that you maintain and improve can be the path! - Writing an Access application to provide features that a user base would want. Niching down here on a target market is important here. You may also be competing with other programs that offer similar features. Many customers who have you create their database will believe that it would be simple to resell their database as a generic database to their competitors. This is usually not the case as apps written specifically for a department, company, or person are usually pretty specific to the way they want to see them. This happens because it is much faster to write code specifically to match a certain set of requirements rather than take more time to write general interfaces and forms that would work for more people.
- So far we have looked at consumers of applications. But how about other Access users or Access developers? One way to monetize your skills is to write an add-in for Access to provide new features and functionality. You can actually create Access Add-ins using Microsoft Access (and if you are a programmer there are other options as well like TwinBasic or .NET)
- What else might Access users / developers want? Training, reference, or coding help. This can come in the form of books, online classes, Zoom help, video training, and / or cohorts for example.
Have you monetized your Microsoft Access skills? Have any more good tips? Let me know!