Most people calculate the cost of a career switch wrong. They look at the tuition, stop there, and end up either reassured or frightened by a number that isn’t the real one.
The formula
Real Cost = Tuition + Income Gap
Where Income Gap is the income you would have earned at your current job during the transition, minus the income you actually earn during the transition.
Worked example
A bootcamp costs $10,000 in tuition. It runs six months, with no income during that time. Your current job pays $38,000 a year, so six months of it is $19,000.
$10,000 + ($19,000 − $0) = $29,000
That’s the number to plan against. Not $10,000. The figures here are an example of the calculation, not a claim about what any program costs or pays.
Run it for your route
- Tuition and fees: ______________
- Months in transition: ______________
- What you’d have earned over those months: ______________
- What you’ll actually earn over those months: ______________
- Income Gap (subtract the second from the first): ______________
- Real Cost (tuition + income gap): ______________
What this changes
Two things, usually. A route that looked cheap because tuition was low can turn out expensive once the income gap is counted — and a route that looked expensive can turn out cheaper than an unpaid one, because you kept earning throughout. That second case is why earn-while-you-learn routes often win on this calculation despite a longer timeline.
This gives you one number per route. What it doesn’t give you is the other side: how fast income recovers afterwards, and whether it recovers to more than you left. The Guided Route System builds that out into a speed-to-income map across month 12 and month 24.