In a recent article entitled “Five Unusual Work-from-Home Jobs” CareerBuilder.com Candace Corner offers titles and descriptions of five jobs, and presents these as alternatives to “mystery shopping and online surveys” (Candace Corner, MSNCareers-CareerBuilder.com, 2006) – which is apparently the type of work that Ms. Corner and others think makes up telecommuting or work-from-home employment. 

 
Not only is this article off-the-mark when it lists “massage therapist” and “personal fitness trainer” as work-from-home job options, it is somewhat offensive in its depiction of a telecommuting income as a secondary income or “a little extra cash”; telecommuters can earn as much as their on-site counterparts and the financial benefits of working from home include saved travel, auto maintenance, and food costs.

Besides massage therapist and personal fitness trainer, the article describes these other opportunities: online teacher or professor; exotic pet sitter; and figure model.  Figure model?  Obviously working from home is a trend and CareerBuilder.com would be remiss not to include information about telecommuting on its site.  But to pull random non-traditional, open-location jobs out of the air and write about them as if they were in fact telecommuting or “work-from-home” jobs is lazy journalism.  Of the five jobs cited in the article, only one – online teacher or professor – rings true as an actual work-from-home job: a job that can be accomplished independently and completely from home and one that is not a small business in-and-of itself.

 Real choices for work-from-home jobs are rarely unusual.  They include accountant, architect, author, bookkeeper, data entry clerk, graphic artist, lawyer, realtor, and software engineer.  Tetanus shots (exotic pet sitter) or “a positive body image” (figure model) are infrequently required of people who make their living – or money on the side – working from home. 

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