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?
Can’t argue about that 
My work base is home and that’s where I do all my admin, marketing, editing etc. Of course, as a photographer, I go elsewhere to take the actual photos, but taking of photos is probably only 20% of a photographer’s job.
Yes, but even if you go elsewhere to take photos, you’re still technically working from home.
My wife-to-be has a travel agency business in Moscow. She is moving to Taiwan soon and arranging deputy staff in Moscow office. She tries to get inquiries from internet and talk to customers via Skype and lets the deputy staff do routine tasks such as issuing and delivering tickets to customers. Customers transfer service fees to her account directly. Or she might let the deputy staff take and deposit the money to her account I’m snot sure.
Anyway I think this way is feasible.
[quote=“Milkybar_Kid”]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?[/quote]
Translation - you need a lot of guanxi, or a contract with an agency works better, for steady enough work to come in to make a living.
Web based business - seems OKish, no one has hit the big bucks yet, but it is a growing medium.
Import/export - mafan de putaliao. You have to travel a lot. It is not just computer stuff, and the money … it can get complicated. But it is a common field. Beware of local partners, backstabbing is frequent. Most trips entail visiting lovely China backwaters where factories are located, immunizations are a must.
Writing - yep, it is a very competitive field, see guanxi, agents as in translation. But I still hope for the next Hemingway to make a great novel of this wonderful island of ours. Or at least, report decently on Computex.
I work from home as a translator. Easily make enough to make a living, but then I don’t translate Chinese.
The domestic translation industry here seems to be very competitive from what I can see, but I don’t partake in it.
If you spoke another language (particularly a European one) it’d probably be better to work with that one and get paid in Euros.
Import/Export would be quite easy to get into I’d imagine. Well, it would be easy enough to find the factories willing to export; how good are your contacts back home to find places looking to import? But you’d be mostly on the road with that one rather than strictly ‘from home’.
Travel planning is actually a great thing to get into from home. If you can get a galileo cert and book flights yourself that’s awesome, if not you can do the ‘organisation’ aspect - airport pick ups, hotels, tours etc. It’s actually quite hard to find good information when you’re travelling to Taiwan, and there are more and more travellers here. In the same vein, you might be able to set up a one-off service for newbies escaping America - $300 to $500 and you’ll find them an apartment, help them open a bank account and help them go over their contracts and work permit/ARC paperwork, and get them from the airport if they need it. For the apartment thing you could probably hook up with a local studio flat (taofang) place and get them a nice room (with mattress/blankets) for three months, which should be long enough that they can decide to stay there or move on. You can toss in all sorts of extra touches that aren’t difficult to do (a Yo-yo card, for example, or a pre-paid SIM) but that having it all prepared just makes leaving home that little bit less daunting, and all it costs you mostly is time.
Hell, my friend’s parents pushed her into paying $5,000 for a similar service (they included plane tickets and visas and only two nights accommodation) and she didn’t get anywhere NEAR that much useful help. I remember my first day here I spent running around from place to place trying to organise everything; I don’t mind doing it but some people prefer it done for them.
My employer is in Tennesee, but I’m working from Taiwan over the summer. I do project controls in the construction and engineering industry. After working for the company for two years and getting a manager with whom I work really well, I requested to work remotely for the summer. Now I’m busting my butt to make it work out and after I go back and finish up my current project, I’ll probably talk to management about working remotely on a regular basis.
Today you can do practically any business with a computer, internet connection, and a smartphone from anywhere in the world.
I am not sure what the OP did before he/she came here. Is this a possibility?
Otherwise investigate the possibilities people have raised. Just make sure you do a proper investigation into your options.
My brother worked out here as a software engineer for a company back in the UK for a couple of years, 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 Philipinos 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.
[quote=“Milkybar_Kid”]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?[/quote]
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.
I work online and am in Taiwan for the month. Back to the US in July.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
life
altering
experience