Are you re-entering the workforce? Have you been working from home with an internet driven job? Don’t forget the skills you learned working from home when you’re preparing for your job interviews. Most home based careers use skills that are much in demand in the conventional workplace – time management skills, data entry, and typing speed, writing and editing and verbal communications, even administrative and project coordination skills and computer programming.

Lots of people leave the conventional 9-5 workforce for a while; they suffer a layoff, or have a child and maternity and paternity leave, and don’t want to be away from the youngster while they’re forming their parental bonding, or they retired and wanted part time work from home, or they’re considering a career change. When re-entering the workforce, there’s always the concern from employers that a candidate’s skills are outdated and they may be hesitant to hire that person.

Here’s a list of strong selling points about yourself if you’ve worked from home and are going back to work for someone else.

1) Time management. Nothing kills home based business productivity like a lack of time management skills. If you’re the sort of person who avoided the siren song of procrastination, and got your work done early, then you can legitimately claim to be a goal oriented self-starter.

2) Project management. Most home based businesses involve running multiple projects at the same time and keeping deadlines in place, or keeping the work of multiple contributors coordinated, edited, compiled, and laid out.

3) Data entry and typing speed. These skills are always in demand, and doing them from home is a great way to keep them fresh. Likewise, if you worked as a medical or technical transcriptionist, this is a useful (and marketable) skill that you shouldn’t be shy about showing off.

4) Computer programming and graphic design. These two (seemingly) unrelated fields are ideal for home based work; they’re also ones that are, to varying degrees, in demand. You need to have fluency with the production environments used for the standards in these fields, and you need to be able to demonstrate talent – fortunately, working from home, you can build up an impressive portfolio.

5) Administrative tasks. It’s surprising how many administrative tasks (juggling schedules, tracking deadlines and more) can and are done from home; if you’ve helped other businesses run while you’ve been working from home, this is a managerial skill that’s in strong demand.

So, just because you’ve been working from home, don’t sell yourself short. A lot of the skills you used to make your job work from home are eminently marketable. What you don’t have is a regular employment history; what you do have is a strong portfolio, and (if you’re doing consulting work) a list of clients who can be used for referrals.

And, as an aside – don’t forget to shop for a new outfit before heading to an interview. A new suit will make you feel more confident about yourself, and won’t send the message that you last updated your skills when you last updated your wardrobe.

posted by Chris Simpson