Undress4Success - Work From Home

Work-at-home employers, many of whom never meet their prospective employees, need to know that the people they hire can do what they say they can. Many use online testing to pre-qualify candidates. If you’re not a fan of taking tests, or if you’ve been out of the job market in a while, this can be pretty intimidating. One way to build confidence—and skills—is to take advantage of one of the free and low cost on-line testing services.

Brainbench is one of the largest providers of on-line testing. While they’re in the business of paid testing, they offer a cadre of really excellent free tests as well. Over 40 of their 600 tests are currently amomg their free offerings. There are four types of free tests:

Sponsored Certifications - these certifications are sponsored by Brainbench and some of their partners. These tests do not include a hardcopy certificate, but are included in the online transcript that Brainbench uses to track your achievements.

Personality Assessment - The Brainbench Personality Assessment provides you with information regarding your personality.

Beta Tests - As Brainbench develops tests, they are placed in “Pre-Release (Beta)” status to collect valuable statistics and to obtain test taker feedback.

Fun Tests - Brainbench offers ~over 30 fun tests, covering everything from Star Trek and Shakespeare to Baseball and Harry Potter.

Here’s a sampling of Brainbench’s current freebies:

Adobe Photoshop CS3

AJAX

Business Writing

C++

Computer Fundamentals (Win XP)

Macintosh OS X 10.4 Desktop Administration

MS Windows Vista Desktop Administration

MS Word 2003

Typing Speed & Accuracy

Web Development Concepts

Adobe InDesign CS3 Beta

Dreamweaver CS3 Beta

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 - Essentials Beta

QuickBooks Pro 2008 Beta

Web Design Concepts (Refresh) Beta

If you’re a Brainbench user, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you thought of the testing or, better yet, how improving your skills helped you land a work-at-home  job.

With the economy in trouble, scammers are trying to hire people just like you. They’re offering “work-at-home” jobs that promise excellent part-time money if you’ll help their accounting department. What do they want to you to do? Only some light accounting and help pay bills. Sounds reasonable.

They offer you a job with a title such as “international sales representative” or “shipping manager,” and you’re asked to open a new bank account in their name, process anonymous payments into your account, and forward those payments to locations—usually in Europe. The money is real, they say, and you’re promised a cut. So you cautiously sign up, to see if it’s legit. You check your account balances and, zowie, big bucks are really there. Happy Day!

But wait just a minute. Didn’t you wonder why you have to open an account for Mr. Big Shot Corporation? What’s with that?

Trouble is, what looks like a nice little home accounting business is actually a laundry business. If you fall for this you’ll be helping criminals launder money—pay each other while disguising the source for them. Until you go to jail, of course. Remember, ignorance is no excuse.

The ads for this scam are professional looking and convincing, and they tout easy money. But they don’t offer much in the way of details. What they count on, frankly, is that you’re dumb enough—and greedy enough—to think there really is such thing as easy money, and that such jobs are really legitimate. There isn’t, and they aren’t.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if it’s too good to be true, it usually is.

Last week SmartBrief on Workforce asked its readers: Do you expect workers at your company to work from home more often in 2009?

Here’s what their 150+ respondents said:

• 51 respondents (34.93%) said: No, we have the technology to do it and many jobs could be accomplished at a distance, but it doesn’t mesh well with company culture
• 31 respondents (21.23%) said: Yes, it’s an initiative management and workers have wholeheartedly embraced
• 30 respondents (20.55%) said: No, most of our employees’ work simply can’t be done offsite
• 22 respondents (15.07%) said: Yes, but only grudgingly. Management would prefer to have people onsite, but other business challenges are forcing it to set aside objections
• 12 respondents (8.22%) said: No, but if workers ask for it, we’ll consider it

Granted it was a small study, but it matches what we continue to hear in the market. Sad to say bosses still cling to the typing pool mentality. They want to see their workers working.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be offering advice for how to approach your boss about letting you work from home

More and more companies are finally catching on to the benefits of a work at home staff, but we recently ran across one that REALLY gets it. Here’s a first hand account from a new employee of Four Rivers Software.

“In one of my orientation sessions the CEO explained that he believes in a level playing field. I asked what he meant. What he means is that because I will be a remote employee, no one who is in Pittsburgh will have more of an edge than people in the field. They require that every person in the company works from home, even if they are based in Pittsburgh so that they get the feeling of being a remote employee. For instance, the VP has to work from home four days a week. Everyone comes into the office on Wednesdays (except field positions.) He said that he had a job once where he was remote and he would often hear jokes going on in the conference room in the corporate office while the remote people did not know what was going on and he did not like that philosophy. He said they often do conference calls from their own offices so that they are all not in the same room at the same time and to have the same experience as the remote people.”

Wow, our hats are off to Four Rivers Software!