Our lives are filled with electronics: television, stereo systems, computers, cell phones, and handheld PDAs just to name a few. I hear on the news from time to time about fridges that will soon be able to tell you when you’ve run out of milk. What was once science fiction has moved into science fact.
What’s more, these electronic components need to talk to each other. We use cables, infrared beams, and Bluetooth technology and try to get them to communicate with each other. Moreover, the pressure on businesses to have a functional and interactive website is immense.
While many things are becoming more and more user friendly, there is also a growing demand for technical people to help us connect these electronic components into our lives and make them work seamlessly with everything else.
If my stereo system doesn’t work, I call the stereo system help desk. If my computer doesn’t work, I call the computer system help desk. If my cell phone doesn’t work, I call the cell phone help desk.
This current scenario falls far short of what most of us need. How often have you experienced this scenario: after waiting for an extremely long time on hold listening to elevator music and hearing “Your call is important to us and will be answered in rotation” you finally reach someone who says, “Why don’t you just try turning your computer off and then back on again?”
We need someone to fill the gap between the extremely poor service we receive from current help desks and the user-friendly high-connectivity need we have to keep our components all working together.
Are you a technical person? Could this kind of job work for you? Why not develop skills in a series of electronic components and open a call center where someone can call in, give their credit card number, and pay per minute of service.
Or, go one step further and do more than many computer stores are offering these days and actually go to a person’s home to help them set up their computer and connect it to the components that they need it to connect to. While some computer stores offer a set-up service, there aren’t a lot that will go the extra mile and plug all your systems in together to make them work.
In doing some business planning for a local company who wants to start their own website design business, I noticed that many companies offer website design and Internet marketing (two skills in high demand) but really only offered one at a good level and the other was fairly weak. If you can do one or the other really well, approach the companies and offer to be the outsource expert that they can hire to fill in for the area that they are weaker in. Customers pay them and then they pay you.
Connectivity is such a major issue and since it is not really covered by anyone very well, a third party service provider (perhaps a technical person like yourself!) can step in and offer a solution. I see this a lot with wireless Internet service providers who offer the components but very little service or with computer systems that also connect to television and stereo components. This need will continue to rise when those shopping list fridges finally appear.
In a sense this is like networking that you might do in a corporate setting only with a different purpose and customer base.
Technical people are in high demand and will likely always have good jobs. For those technical people who are looking to start their own businesses, there are many opportunities.
