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Nowadays, in this rapidly growing world, people are more and more asking for work that can be done directly from home. They hope to go on earning income without living the hours or stress of office life. They look for flexibility because they are often caring for elderly parents or young children. Furthermore, the youth is more than ever attracted to “free agency”. According to Michael Haaren, co-director of RatRaceRebellion.com and co-author of Work at Home Now, “there’s less willingness today to be a cube-dweller or lifetime commuter.” He adds, “Being able to work from home makes life easier and appeals to the latent entrepreneur.” Usually there may be a compromise to working at home, such as a salary haircut and less progression possibility. However, today, one can find a surprising amount and variation of well-paying professional jobs from the health, tech and creative industries.
For Haaren, the work-from-home sector shows what is going on in the brick-and-mortar economy. First come the healthcare jobs: Home-based physicians and radiologists are the top paid amongst them. In the US, they are now being hired by companies such as “Imaging On Call” and “Permedion” to review and evaluate patient cases. According to Haaren, they should be earning around the $1,975 median weekly income of physicians, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The “telehealth” field is also gaining prominence as it offers quality wages and full benefits and many companies are hiring at-home support staff. For Haaren, they get between $30,000 and $50,000 a year and are eligible for a signing bonus. Registered nurses who also work at home are paid around $1,055-per-week industry median to do telephone triage, advising patients about health concerns over the phone.
As for the IT field, Haaren says that it was one of the first fields to stick to the anywhere mentality, because of its workforce, which is generally composed of young people, and because of its penchant for abstraction. In 2008, Oracle bought a completely virtual IT company MySQL for $1 billion. Its at-home staff helps reducing many costs including the building ones and offering a bigger talent pool. In addition, it is a benefit for the employees. For the BLS, computer software engineers are paid a median of $1,549 each week and $85,000 a year. Computer scientists, programmers and systems administers all get about $1,200 per week. As for jobs such as public relations specialists, graphic designers, writers and authors, and postsecondary teachers, they can also be very lucrative when done at-home. In the book Make Money Teaching Online by Danielle Babb and Jim Mirabella, if online adjunct professors work hard enough, they can get six-figure salaries.
However, for Haaren, older fields, like law and high finance, have not held up to the flexibility demands of the new workforce but show signs of cracking. For instance, every now and then Chase JPMorgan hires regional home-based mortgage executives. While these positions are limited, financial managers get a median of $1,227 per week. According to Haaren, many studies show that at-home workers are willing to be paid up to 30% less. But, if you add it to the savings on real estate costs, “It’s a good deal for both.”
