How to get work while being a live in nurse?

March 25, 2011 2:30 PM

How do you find work at home or part time as an electrical engineer?

I have a friend who has a very ill girlfriend and has to spend most of his time at home taking care of her. He's got a degree in electrical engineering buy very little practical experience. What are good options for working from home or very part time for him?

posted by drethelin to work & money (3 answers total)

Its going to be hard without any real experience. Typically a well proven design engineer could persuade their employer to let them work out of home temporarily. After all they just need a workstation and an internet connection. Hard to see this happening in this case.

Can your friend write software? Picking up contract work for web or app development might be the best bet.
posted by Long Way To Go at 3:47 PM on March 25, 2011

If he has any specific product skills, or can pick them up fast, he should try for telephone technical support.

Cisco, Avaya, and even Google Voice technologies make it almost transparent to be a phone worker sitting at home versus in a physical call center. I did it for a few weeks (I'm usually a field technician) while my partner was recovering from surgery.

But again I had the benefit of a deep knowledge of the subject, so I could troubleshoot literally with my eyes closed.

My company also had some less-technically-skilled people in the department who worked as night-shift triage and dispatchers, also from their homes in Texas and Ohio.
posted by Kakkerlak at 6:19 PM on March 25, 2011

He can get some experience, for starters.

How? Find someone with a problem and solve it for free. Find 10 more people like that and build a reputation as a problem solver. Word will get around.

He can prospect by looking for want ads for engineers and calling each company looking for contract work while they find their eventual employee.

He can get sub-employed.... repair work at a consumer electronics company, like Best Buy. Fixing computers.

An EE is good background, but it is not a cure all for laziness or lack of initiative or shyness.

Your questions is rather general. Where is this guy? What is his EE specialty? What is he any good at? What kind of equipment and software does he own/possess? What type of work does he want to do? (Examples... design, programming, production support, automation, test, yada yada.) Are there even any local customers for him to cultivate?

Work will not find him. He has to look, look hard, and keep looking and look again after he looks. There is no shortage of problems.
posted by FauxScot at 5:22 AM on March 26, 2011