You’ve made the big decision to quit your full-time job to focus on your family as a stay-at-home mum (SAHM). However, with only your spouse working, it can get challenging paying for the monthly household expenses and your child’s essentials. Don’t you hope that you can earn some extra income to ease your spouse’s load and set aside some savings for emergency?
What home-based or part-time job options do you have?
1. Know Your Skills
Make a list of skills you can do. Do not limit yourself to the traditional SAHM skills of home baking, data entry, writing or telemarketing.
Envision yourself as a PR consultant, Uber-mom, music teacher, graphic designer, tutor, goodie bag creator, professional cake decorator, sports instructor, web developer, personal shopper, baby items importer, counsellor, distributor of your favourite overseas cult brand, and lots more.
Although you may not be able to stay at home all the time, you can still schedule your out-of-home working hours to coincide with the time of the day when your kids are in school or occupied with enrichment activities.
2. Expand Your Network and Mind
Keep those name cards of business asssociate that you have met and stay connected on LinkedIn and other social media connections. You never know when a contact can lead on to job opportunities.
Join support networks such as Mums@Work, The Athena Network, meetup.com and Facebook parenting groups to learn more from other parents and update yourself with the latest trends, skills and opportunities.
Find courses that you have interest in and aim to learn a skill or two – such as growing your own herbs, wedding photography and even a local architecture appreciation course.
Search the SkillsFuture directory for courses (you can use your $500 SkillsFuture credit), and check out these SkillsUpgrade courses (which are eligible for NTUC’s UTAP training grant).
3. Get Yourself Listed On These Networking/Job Sites
List yourself as a work-from-home job candidate on various organisations such as:
NTUC’s Women Development Secretariat
careermums
Mums@Work
flexiwerkz
freelancer.sg
Singapore Part Time Jobs
parttimejobs.sg
Gumtree
Job portals which offer work-from-home listings
If you are working as a freelancer, learn about your contractual rights before you take up any job.
4. Don’t Forget Why You Are Going Back To Work
A job is more than just a means of income. It is also a way to express ourselves, to fulfil our passions and create a useful product or service out of the skills we are blessed with.
Our role as a mum is to provide for our families, be it a stay-at-home mum, work-at-home mum, working mum. In the end, it is up to each mum how she chooses the best fit for her and her family.
I wish you all the best for your back-to-work journey.
Contributed By Julia Chan
http://julesofsingapore.com/
