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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!)"
Systems security consultant: You don't even have to be given access to the systems you need to remotely access!
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Find and organization that encourages Telecommuting and it won't matter what job you have. My org does this and everyone from developers to project managers to secretaries can be remote if they desire. I am not only remote but I have a very nonstandard workday; pretty much whatever I want whether it's 2am or 9-5. I have never met most of the people in my department and many of them are remote as well.
People e-mail me tips every day about how I can work at home. I've never looked into it, but it sounds like there are dozens of ways that you can be self-employed and make thousands of dollars per week, with little or no investment required. I'm surprised you haven't seen these tips, everybody I know seems to get them. I'll forward them to you if you want.
You don't give us any idea of what your current skill set is, so it is hard to offer meaningful advice.
Question: is your skill set rare enough that your current employer might be conviced to allow you to work remotely most of the time? Perhaps you can offer to telecommute 3 out of 4 weeks, and be on site for the 4th week. True, if there are more people with your skill set than there are jobs you are screwed, but the fact that you are currently employed suggests that may not be the case.
You may also be able to start consulting in your current work area, and thus travel to the customers' sites. You might be away from your wife for much of the time, but if you are bringing in enough money you can consult 9 months out of the year, and coast the other 3. That may even work out better depending upon your wife's schedule - you may find you can take a nice vacation over the summer months.
Otherwise, you will have problems - if a job can be outsourced to Joe Bloggs in the USA over the phone, it can be outsourced to Miguel Jloggs in Mexico, Chackra Coggs in India, etc. If your skill set isn't rare enough, you can be replaced, so you will have problems.
Can you give us a hint as to what area you are in?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'm very happy with my job as a Systems Administrator for a major IT outsourcing company. Because there is an on-site hardware group, there is no reason for us to be in the office at all. My coworkers and I work from home (with new management having just created a less nazi-like policy than my former management) under very reasonable terms. In short, if I get my work done, and I respond quickly to requests, they don't care if I am at the beach or on the moon.
So, a Systems Administrator role that is not tied to performing the on-site hardware maintenance is a very nice work-from-home job. Of course, FINDING a position like that is tough!
As a embedded software developer who does a lot of telecommuting I can assure you telecommuting is not all it is cracked up to be.
On the home front, things tend to get muddled up and it's difficult to keep home and work life separate. Make sure to set up an office in a separate locked area so you can "leave the office" for the day.
I find that a good balance is to mix it up, spending about half the time at my place, half at the "real" office.
Beware the pitfalls of jealous and politically inclined co-workers who haven't been permitted to telecommute because they are perceived as slackers by management.
Seriously. Four years from now, you will have worked your ass off putting your wife through the PhD program. Having to deal with a lot of shit and being the chief breadwinner. It'll be time for you to take a break. She's got a PhD now, so you can sit back, figure out which beer you like the best, maybe pick up some tennis or something. Trust me, you'll want a break. Then after a year or so announce that your skills are outdated and that you are going to go back and get your own PhD.
Another possibility might be staying with your job. I'm not suggesting that you divorce, but you might want to try a commuter marriage for a short time.
Despite what you might expect, statistics show that people in commuter marriages are actually less likely to divorce than married people who are actually living together. At least according to the textbook of my sociology of the family class...
There are obvious problems (like not being anywhere near each other), but you can arrange things such that you see each other on weekends.
My Dad's a college professor and spends a semester in Washington D.C. every 2-4 years. My Mom stays home (she's an elementary school teacher). So far (some 20 years into this arrangement) it goes okay.
Granted it's not the same thing as staying home while your significant other begins her career, but at least for a couple years, it might be a worth considering.
At any rate it's better than heading off to get another degree (as suggested above...).
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
"My current skill set ties me to only a handful of major cities...."
Nope, it's your attitude that ties you to those cities. If you'll open your mind you'll find that your "skill set" includes things that could get you hired anywhere.
Drop all the way back to the very basics for a moment. You could pump gas or flip burgers. The chances are good that you could stock shelves at a Wal Mart or answer the telephone in a legal office. Work up from there.
The only problem that I see you having is that the only "skill set" you WANT to use ties you to those cities. I live in an area where there are quite a few folks who were in either entertainment or law enforcement in southern California. Don't ask me why people from those professions are so common here, I don't know. But they have either dropped back to basic skills to live here or learned other skills.
You can too.
Methinks you just need to open your mind a bit more.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
And, to be perfectly honest, given the 'immediacy' trend currently sweeping through the business world - (i.e. being able to get hold of people immediately - cell phones, pagers, e-mail, v-mail, etc - to make up for poor planning) - most of the time your physical presence is required.
Flying back at the weekend is kinda going out of fashion. Money is _the_ issue. I had the other route, three hour drive Friday evening/Sunday night for a couple of years. It works, but it also takes a chunk out of my life that could of been used more productively (1. It's unsafe to play Quake at ~77 mph, 2. There's large zones where there's no phone service, let alone wireless, in the midwest ;)
Support works remotely, and has done for years, but, again, biz types feel the need to see your face in the office (which looks like an extra from any ED flick after fixing problems throughout the night. Did work at one place that had a dedicated support group ... which worked very well, apart from the detail most people hate working midnight till 8 ... but, again, cancelled due to management concerns.
The value of actually sitting with someone cannot be underestimated. There's a gazillion cues in face to face, of which teleconferencing (assuming you'd have such a thing at your home) captures only a fraction. A quick sketch on a napkin can convey more than pages of e-mail.
Been at a couple of places that do use telecommuting for help desks. Then again, helpdesks have pretty much completed the transformation into helpless desks, a source of infinite frustration to be used after everything else has failed.
And, one option that works to varying degrees, is partial telecommuting. I.e. you show your face at the office once a week, or go in for a week once a month. _Some_ companies have pulled this off to the point where they have double the number of programmers than desks.
Translation work functions fine for telecommuting. Know of several people and places that do this. Not quite your line, but anyway ...
And you mentioned working at a bank. There's another issue working against you there ... managers don't like the 'security risk' of people dialing in remotely. Place I was at just tossed Citrix (128 bit SSL) for MickeySloth's 'more secure' version. Technical reality is not the same as managerial decision making reality ... what is technically best (including telecommuting) does not include all the other factors (cost, perception, fitting in with the corporate image) that managers also use.
In short, I'd say, if you can get it, go for a place that offers telecommuting, but the odds are still against never having to don a suit again.