So I have been a freelance SEO consultant for quite some time now, and I have to admit that one thing that really struck me is, that i do not think I could ever go back to an office environment. The whole 9-5 grind, shitty wage for a mind numbing job. Sure, I have been writing about iPhone space games now for a month, but I can do it wherever I want, whenever I want.
One thing that has also become increasingly apparent is that building up a knowledge set is an amazing way to break free of this and launch your own career. I am not talking about an education here. There are two major problems with just having an education, the first is it denotes lack of experience (unless you have experience to back it up) and secondly it means that you have been taught from textbooks not from experience.
This sounds stupid, but in many fields the texts that are being taught are out of date. Case in point, my brother was being taught about web design and his lecturer had the audacity to say that keywords were an important factor in SEO, this has not been true for around half a decade.
The worst part is that if the students do their own research and learn the correct methods of SEO, they fail their exams.
If you have experience on the other hand, you know what works and what doesn't, because you have had to do it.