[Posted: 02/28/07]

 
 
Most people looking for data entry jobs don’t need an article in Business Week to tell them the work is hard to find. But there it is anyway -- and the jobs are predicted to become even scarcer, particularly in certain regions of the US.
 
“At the top of the ranking,” the article says, “are San Francisco; San Jose, Calif.; Boulder, Colo.; Lowell, Mass.; and Stamford, Conn. The five cities are expected to lose between 3.1% and 4.3% of their jobs to outsourcing between 2004 and 2015. The next tier of metro areas is forecast to lose 2.6% to 3.0% of their jobs. It includes Boston, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Washington…”
 
(For the full article, click here.)
 
The home-based data entry field is riddled with scams -- one of the worst “scam ratios” in the entire work-at-home arena, according to our research -- because the demand for the work is so high, and the projects themselves (in North America, in any case) never plentiful.
 
Further, many people are desperate for data entry work, and desperation breeds fraud. People who can’t afford to upgrade their professional skills -- or who have been out of the workforce for long periods --often find their work options limited, and data entry is one of the few niches available to them. Worse, not only are they competing against each other, they’re competing with low-cost labor abroad. The scammers know all this, of course, and it brings them out en masse.
 
People on a tight budget -- in addition to any financial aid they might qualify for -- might consider free professional-development courses such as these, offered by Hewlett-Packard.
 
They might also check with their local One-Stop Career Center (see the directory at http://www.servicelocator.org/ ) to see if any inexpensive or no-cost courses are offered.
 
Have a look too at free Microsoft Office tutorials, as well as at free-ed.net, where details on a wide variety of free courses can be found.
 
Good luck, and for more on scams, see our article on spotting scams, and the current (April) edition of Consumers Digest, for the comprehensive “Today’s Biggest Internet Scams” (in which Chris is quoted), beginning at p. 29.