> Something that someone from the street can pick up in a couple months isn’t likely to command an enduring market premium.

There's a large gap between your local market value and that in a poorer country. On the Balkan, a nurse will have a terrible salary, but if she goes through a bootcamp and learns enough to be useful in QA, she'll quickly make 2-3x what she would earn working in a hospital. There's a pretty hard ceiling when you approach Western income levels, but everyone I talked to is super happy hitting that ceiling, because it'll mean they have great income compared to the national average.