Work-at-Home Hiring Trends -- Credentials were King, Soon to Be Emperor

The numbers fluctuate, but virtual call center Alpine Access recently said it receives about 100,000 applications per year, and chooses 2% for jobs. Other virtual hirers report similar lopsided ratios.

(To put things in perspective, Harvard received 22,796 undergrad applications in 2009, and admitted 9%.)

However, it could be worse. On the brick-and-mortar side, companies are either not hiring, laying off, squeezing more productivity from existing workers, or all of the above.

Now King, Credentials Will Soon be Emperor

The "online workforce" -- aka competition for Internet-centric work -- is set to explode, and the status of one's credentials will rise from king to emperor (or dictator). China alone now has roughly 420M Internet users, and as mind-boggling as that number might seem, it's only 30% of the population. (To compare, all of North America has only 260M users, representing 76% of the population.)

In India, the "upside" is even larger than in China: only 81M people are online, of a population of 1.1B.

China and India -- unlike the US -- are highly entrepreneurial cultures. China has a self-employment rate of 51% -- the US rate is a feeble 7% -- with its entrepreneurs reporting impressively ambitious goals. And India's emigres alone have launched untold millions of businesses around the world. (For more on these trends, see our Rat Race Rebellion Bulletin of March 19, and sources quoted there.)

In the meantime, in the US alone, 78M Boomers are contemplating the redefinition of their retirement dreams, with additional years of work increasingly likely. Millions of these folks will want to work from home if they can, leveraging decades of experience. (Their presence is already being felt in the virtual call center arena, where many have taken jobs as home-based customer-service agents.)

Bottom line? If you're looking for a work-at-home job and have been waiting to upgrade your credentials, wait no longer. "Beg, borrow or steal" the means to add armor to your resume, and steel yourself for a demanding campaign -- As always, the marketplace will reward those who hustle, plan, and think and act creatively.