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!)"

It's the organization not the job

[gelfling]

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.

Narrow View, Self-limited

[ONOIML8]

"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.

Re:Consulting

[lrichardson]

Flip side of the coin is that MANAGERS don't like telecommuting ... kinda shows that they're not as necessary as they'd like the upper levels (not to mention the workers) to believe.

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.