Working from home/ online whilst living in Taiwan

[grandfeller]

... but he had a lot of expertise and experience in his field so his skills were in demand, it's certainly not something you could just do.

Exactly. I see two main options to be able to work remotely. One is to start your own business that can be run from here. The other is to first gain experience (so that you're valuable) and your employer's trust (so he knows you'll be productive without immediate supervision), then make the transition from office to home-office. Option two there, of course, requires a desk job that doesn't require much or any field work.

For the first option, freelance software development comes to mind. Still, though, you need experience and expertise, both for the industry contacts to get jobs and to be able to compete with bright Indians and Filipinos who are willing to work for much less than I. I have a friend who does that in the UK, though, and is doing fine. Or start a company that employs Indian software engineers. For that, technical skills would be nice but not necessary. Instead you would need great management skills, good contacts, and money to pay your workers.

[skoster]

Hi,

Does anyone currently work from home whilst living in Taiwan? I am trying to think of the industries or areas to get into in order to work from home.

Off the top of my head I can only think of:

Translation (need language skills)
Web based business (need web skills)
Import/export (need....erm....)
Writing (Filipinos can write better English than me for a lower price)

So is anyone successfully working from home?

Yep, but none of those options and still living in the USA (about 1 more year of prep and I can move anywhere with stable broadband).

[grandfeller]

Yep, but none of those options and still living in the USA (about 1 more year of prep and I can move anywhere with stable broadband).

Well, come on; do tell! We'd all love to hear your plan.

[steelersman]

I work online and am in Taiwan for the month. Back to the US in July.

[Taiwan_Student]

How about teaching English via the internet from home? Do these companies that provide online learning to the Taiwanese market still shun teachers who want to work from within Taiwan. I have an open permit so.. employing people like me would not involve any more paperwork? I'm only interested in picking up part time income.

[steelersman]

How about teaching English via the internet from home? Do these companies that provide online learning to the Taiwanese market still shun teachers who want to work from within Taiwan. I have an open permit so.. employing people like me would not involve any more paperwork? I'm only interested in picking up part time income.

You can try Kojen Online. However I believe Korean companies pay more to teach online.

[SloanRanger]

I work from home as a civil engineer. I really love it, although sometimes I miss the banter and just general human contact that I had when I worked in an office/on site. But on the plus side I don't have to commute, don't have to work 9-5 and have more control over what I do.

All my work can be done on a laptop via an internet connection. Most engineering firms now package work up and send it to production offices in places like india and the phillipines. The same technology and ways of working allow me to work remotely from wherever I am in the world.

It's true that it's not something you can just do - you needs some good connections/contacts as trust plays a big part and you need to know enough of your trade & profession in order to be able to work alone and un-supervised - but it's a way of working that seems to becoming more common and I think it'll become applicable to more and more careers in the future. Any job which involves information and particularly if you're adding a process to that information should have some element that could be done remotely.

[headhonchoII]

I work from a home office as sales manager for a European company. I could do that because I have many years of experience in my field and speak Chinese which comes in handy ever now and then. They are happy as it reduces costs significantly, I just meet up with management back at home base twice a year and when colleagues come over from various places.

Schedule wise it's great and there is no commute and few meetings, I have the odd late call internally but not too many as my customers are in Asia.

Working from home can be a bit more difficult with a growing family but at the same time I get to hang out with my kids a lot except for when I am traveling for work. The lack of work colleagues socially is definitely a minus, but then again many of my former Taiwanese colleagues didn't do much either.

I use Skype and outlook and CRM systems for most of my work along and we are trying out new web sharing tech but still not perfect. Once bandwidths improve along with enhanced virtual presence meetings I could see teleworking getting really big. Travel and office costs are a big hit on budgets so many companies will go for that once they they think they can trust you.

When you telework you do miss out on promotion opps too as you are away from home base but overall the freedom makes it difficult for me to think about going back to an office environment full time.

You need to be pretty independent to telework and there is extra work involved such as dealing with bookings, admin and IT issues but once you figure that out it's very doable.

[steelersman]

I would also add, that one won't miss working for a Taiwanese employer when they work from home. Plus you have less useless meetings that are a waste of one valuable time.

[timmyjames]

I would also add, that one doesn't miss working for a Taiwanese employer when they work from home. Plus you have less useless meetings that are a waste of one valuable time.

But then you would miss out on the meeting that is about planning another meeting on how to be more efficient with company time. The first meeting is of course delayed because the person in charge is late due to being "tired" and then 90% of the 4 hour meeting consists of eating cake and discussing/gossiping about how the new girl got a new laptop, while the "old" workers didn't. Then of course the meeting ends, and the next meeting was never properly planned, so a repeat of this meeting is scheduled for a few weeks later.


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