Homeworking
From Dar
Candidate Occupations
Q) Which occupations might be conducted entirely online?
The obvious ones to me are writing, research, moderating, proofreading, web development, facilitation, and touting products on ebay etc. Can you add any interesting possibilities to the list please?
A)
- Pro blogging?
- Book sales?
- Counseling
- Publishing?
- Marketing?
- Video production?
- Video Game Development?
- Music composition?
- And any career which can be monetised in online gaming, such as gold mining, fashion design, or renting land etc.
- Trading (stocks, derivatives, etc.)
- Selling educational products, online courses.
- Three industries at the cutting edge of online technologies: porn, gambling, spamming
- Virtual assistants, sales, teaching, some types of design.
- Buying and selling stuff and space on second life (apparently).
- Training people's avatars for them in MMOGs (apparently).
- Telemedicine
- Transcriptionist
- Virtual assistant
- Reader/interpreter of medical tests (happening now with Xray reading outsourced)
- distance evaluation and re-design of commercial websites and web application.
- example:
- - expert evaluation of user interface (new concept and re-design issue);
- - qualitative research: localized user-test studies (prooved by video-recorded session and detailed reports);
- - quantitative: traffic data analysis;
- - ftp, web-based collab tool (Basecamp, Campfire, ... i.e.) to collaborate on open projects;
- - video/audio meeting, for customer-supplier touchpoint.
- With lots of patience and Search Engine Optimization skills, one can make a decent passive income online, strictly by building and optimizing websites, then promoting Google Adsense (or other contextual ads) and/or appropriate affiliate programs.
Q: What do we mean, "entirely online?" Does that mean any job that for some reason has a F2F would fall off?
A: Thanks for the additions. I suppose what I had in mind when I asked the question originally was the type of job which can be conducted over the internet without requiring that the worker resides in any particular city or region. Maybe even global. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be occasions where f2f is a possibility. I'm thinking of the home worker who may wish to migrate seasonally from one home to another or even operate from a roving location.
References
- PCs and pyjamas drive UK office exodus Hotwired
- An article in The Sunday Times on remote working raises a whole range of issues from worker isolation, promotion prospects to the liberation to the workforce of people considered unfit to work: Sunday Times
