MBA level work from home

January 2, 2007 3:15 PM

Looking for work ideas that utilizes a fresh MBA that can be done from home.

My wife has an MBA from a top 25 business school and would like to avoid the lifestyle sold to her at school (make money. use money to be happy. discover money can't make you happy but perhaps more money could. discover no amount of money can make you happy. realize you've exchanged money for the best years of your life, which is now at its end.).

Instead, she'd like to utilize her training (marketing with an emphasis on research and analysis) while working from home.

is there such a job? how would one find it?

posted by ransom to Work & Money (5 answers total)

There are all sorts of businesses who need that sort of help from time to time, but can't staff for it with an FTE.

Networking is probably the best way to find them. Work would be on a consulting/freelance basis.

Is there a specific market niche where your wife already has expertise and contacts she can draw on? If not, she probably has the tools to figure out a good niche to target.
posted by Good Brain at 3:28 PM on January 2, 2007

A shot in the dark, but what about market research? This is the field I'm in (as a programmer), and I work from home for a Very Large Company. With the particular company I work for, more and more people are working 'remote'. And your wife's focus seems to fit the bill quite nicely. If she wants to lean in the social direction and wants to focus on client-facing work using her marketing background, there are positions for that. Alternately if she doesn't want to have to deal with a lot of people (ie, demanding clients) she could work internally on analysis of data. People with both marketing and statistical background can do quite well for themselves in market research, it seems. (I'm sure she's familiar with SPSS, SAS or other statistical packages.)

Anyways, just a (somewhat biased) thought. Oh, and we're hiring. Email's in profile if she is interested. I have no influence in the hiring process as I'm a lowly programmer, but if she's interested I can point her in the right direction or give more details.

Good luck.
posted by MarkLark at 3:49 PM on January 2, 2007

I have an MBA and work from home. Working from home and making money are not mutually exclusive ;) I'd focus on just getting the right job and try to turn into a work from home thing one she proves her value to the company. Corporate America is certainly getting more on board with telecommuting, but a lot of companies are still leary of it. It's a much easier sale once you are a valuable employee.
posted by COD at 4:52 PM on January 2, 2007

Let's back up a step or a hundred.

What's an "MBA level job"? I'm in the process of preparing applications, and I'm having a hard time answering that myself. Working from home isn't typical for an MBA, whether general management or HR or marketing or operations or whatever. Neither is worrying about making too much!

The lifestyle you describe that she wants to avoid really sounds like management consulting to me. Lots of MBA grads go on to work somewhere other than management consulting and finance: working with small companies, non-profits, and so on.

Is it absolutely necessary to work from home, and not, say, in an office of 10 instead of for Deloitte? MBA jobs do tend to be people jobs rather than things jobs, and people jobs tend to be office jobs.

What was she doing before the MBA? What led her to leave that to do an MBA?

I think the best thing she could do at this point is stop thinking about the MBA for now and try to figure out what kind of work she wants to do. Not whether it's "MBA-level" or how much it pays or whether it's from home or elsewhere -- what would she like to spend her time doing every day?

If she's still in the same area as her school, they'll have career counseling services that might help narrow that down. If not, then her school can connect her with local alumni to network with, or at least who she can talk to to see what others in her situation have done.
posted by mendel at 5:36 PM on January 2, 2007

As someone who worked in a small company, I recommend that before working from home unless she already has a lot of experience in the worforce. It might be useful to know how old she is and why she got that MBA. But to get a satisfying from-home job, you really need marketable skills, a proven record, and connections -- all of which you get from working with people, in person. I'm not going to say that working for a small company is better or easier than working for a large corporation -- sometimes it's much more difficult (you avoid "office politics" in its traditional form but can develop more problematic relationships because you're interacting with fewer people in a more confined space). But in order for someone to take a Masters of Business Administration seriously, she'd better have some serious Business creds.
posted by Deathalicious at 1:13 AM on January 3, 2007