What Types of Jobs are Best Suited for Telecommuters?

upwardlyAndconstantly-Mobile asks: "I'm a systems engineer in the IT department of a bank. My wife is a PhD candidate looking to graduate in 4 years or so. Due to the nature of academia, she may need to move several times for post-docs and professor jobs once she gets her credentials. Her job opportunities may come from any number of cities or towns in the US or around the world. My current skill set ties me to only a handful of major cities, so I am trying to figure out the best path to prepare myself for being uprooted. Besides running something like Slashdot, what are the best tech jobs that are mobile? How many people have jobs that can actually be done from anywhere they can get email and web access? What's the best way to prepare for something like this? I have time to prepare, but what should I be doing? (I write this anonymously because I don't want my current employer reading it!)"

Comments

Confessions of a former ISP Admin

[Jahf]

I was an admin at a mid-level (statewide) ISP for about 4.5 years in the mid-late 1990's. I had a similar situation to yours and didn't know where to go.

Turns out, if you are willing to move out of admin and more into marketing and research, the skillset is highly valued by many companies.

I ended up going to work for a small linux-based ISP equipment manufacturer that within a year got aquired by a major telecomm equipment manufacturer. I'm still with the larger company, though they have had some layoffs during the tech crunch of the last couple of years.

I started out as a field technician for technical support doing remote problem diagnosis and some travel for on-site issues. I was transferred to Sales (not my choice) for a couple of years as a Sales Engineer, where I basically worked as a system engineering consultant helping customers define exactly what products they needed (in many ways, this position can be the antithesis of the dreaded sales rep position since I got to say when the rep was wrong and both sides valued the fact that I was honest in my recommendations). During this time I started working with the product groups to define new products right before the smaller company was aquired. Later, after the aquisition, I found an opportunity to exit Sales (yay!) and went to work for the product definition group as someone who helps define various technical areas of a product that they were not familiar with, as well as provide real-world feedback on feature requests.

All of the above areas are good for someone with practical experience in the field who doesn't mind public speaking. I still work from remote and have moved twice in 3 years. Lately my company has faced lowered travel budgets, so I'm expected to travel less and get to stare out my back office window at the rocky mountains on a daily basis.

During this time I've been approached a number of times (without scouting for them) by other companies who are looking for a similar combination of problem solving/technical knowledge/public speaking for similar jobs. Note that you don't particularly enjoy crowds of people (I don't), but you do need to be able to hold technical discussions with strangers and write/give presentations to large groups (250 is my largest crowd so far) intelligibly and warmly. I usually retire to my hotel room after such a gig and chill out with a movie and room service while the sales and marketing folks go out and party.

I have been considering finishing my degree (I started working at the ISP and dropped out of school due to lack of time) so that if my company cuts more workers I feel confident going back into the IT workplace, but so far it appears that marketing and product definition jobs get cut at a far less rapid rate than remote sales positions at my particular company.