Knowledge Sharing

What are your favorite side-hustle ideas?

No side hustle is permitted when you are working for a corporate company. Such agreement is signed by each employee while joining the company. It is a legal offence if you are having any side hustle.

Hence any side hustle was out of question for me. Neither it was necessary economically nor for the engagement purpose.

However, during 90s and early 2000, there was a directive from Universities, that Industry experts should be invited to deliver the lectures on their topics.

Few MBA colleges like RYK and KTHM approached me for accepting to be a faculty for guest lecture. I was already a corporate trainer and very interested in teaching. This was golden opportunity for me. But the company rule was in place and I never wanted to break the rules.

So I approached to company HR through my boss and requested for permission. I explained that this will not be another job for the additional earning but it will be knowledge sharing and community service. I also explained that this will help our company name to be associated with good institutions and subsequently support talent acquisition.

He was convinced and I got permission to accept the offer of these management colleges as a guest faculty. I was delighted because it was new skill for. Actually I was unsure about how I will perform as a professor in from of post graduate students.

My wife gave me confidence and said pleas go ahead, you will be surely the best faculty. And with so much of motivation, I started in two colleges as a guest lecturer.

Very soon, I became popular faculty because I used to insert my company experience in the form short stories relevant to the topic I am teaching. This was liked by the students very much. The theories in their text book and my stories used to match. This made it easy for them to understand the concepts.

Once, university released a new subject called MRP ( Material Resource Planning ). There was no regular faculty available for this subject. The college director approached me with a request that please take up this subject else students will loose.

I immediately accepted because I had handled this topic in my organisation. The biggest challenge for students was that there was no prescribed book available. They were still struggling to figure out a book which can take care of syllabus entirely.

Finally, I got the book from my contacts and it was used by me for teaching them. Gave them the notes. I finished the complete curriculum in short period of time. All the students were astonished to see the progress. And finally they appeared for the exams and passed out with good marks.

Even today, if any of them meets me, the first topic is how we cracked MRP subject.

For me it was more fulfilling than monetary gains. I did not charge anything to the institution and for me it was free knowledge sharing. But was more than knowledge sharing for me. It was also learning for me.

So my free side hustle idea was an interesting experience.