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According to “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued,” by Anne Crittenden, people who exit the workforce to care for families forfeit income, retirement savings, pensions, and other benefits to the tune of about $1 million. Yikes! If family concerns, medical problems, or plain old geography are keeping you at home and unemployed, check out these options: four careers that can be entered with post-secondary training and are often performed from home.

Requirements range from associate’s programs or certificate career training to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. (For true at-home convenience, these degrees can usually be earned online.)

Medical transcription
Want a job you can do when the kids are at school or down for a nap? Instead of watching Dr. Oz on TV, you could be dealing with real medical issues and getting paid for it. Medical transcriptionists listen to dictated recordings made by doctors and transcribe them into medical reports and other documents. Employers prefer to hire applicants with training in medical transcription from vocational schools, community colleges, or online degree programs.

An associate’s degree or certificate program typically includes coursework in anatomy, legal issues, medical terminology, and writing. The Approval Committee for Certificate Programs (ACCP), established by the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) and the American Health Information Management Association, offers accreditation for medical transcription programs.

Job prospects are good, and you may earn over $20 an hour (at 40 hours a week times 50 weeks a year times 20 years, that’s $800,000!), with no need to eat lunch out, pay for child care, or commute.

Professional sales or business development
Business-development professionals may be called account executives, account directors, business managers, sales representatives, quality assurance managers, program directors, or enterprise managers.

People in these roles usually have a marketing education, whether it’s a bachelor’s degree or an MBA, or a degree in another field (like engineering) and a minor in marketing. Your education depends on the field you want to enter. Many people who work from home stick with their previous industry and add a marketing or business education.

Sales managers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “constitute some of the most important personnel in an organization” and are paid accordingly, with six-figure salaries the norm.

Entrepreneurship
Who cares that your corporate headquarters is in your basement? With an 800 number, a fax line, a fabulous Web site, and a lot of smarts, you can run almost any business you like from your home office. Many telecommuters start where they left off before they took their talent out of the workforce.

Add some business courses (you’ll likely want accounting, finance, marketing, Internet business, and some other classes), hit up your contacts, and prepare to set up shop. Or embark on a whole new venture in graphic design, programming, or online retail sales. Online business degree programs bring the education to you, so you can take your expertise to everyone else.

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Earnings vary widely, depending on the profession you choose. And job satisfaction may be unlimited.

Business process outsourcing (BPO)
A relatively new field with a big demand for professionals (who often work from home), BPO outfits take over the personnel, accounting, or finance functions for other companies, saving those companies the cost of maintaining full-time departments. Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (LPO) are also categories of BPO. If you want a white-collar job but would rather wear sweatpants and T-shirts to work, welcome to BPO.

BPO pros have many roles, such as legal assistants, paralegals, accountants, and computer geeks. Pick what you’d like to do, and then get the credentials–a certificate in legal studies, a bachelor’s in accounting, or even an MBA. The right degree can be earned online and convey the credibility you want. So choose your career, get your degree, and ditch your suits!

Working from home works
Working from home can provide income to tide you over until the kids are older, help you keep your career skills and corporate contacts from evaporating, or snag you a permanent exit from the rat race. And whether you’re preparing for part-time stopgap employment or a full-time all career change, online education can help make the family-work balance easier to achieve.

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