Military Wives and Home-Based Business

When your spouse is in the military, you can look forward to several hardships. He (or she) may be deployed or out to sea frequently, leaving you alone for months on end. You'll move often, and sometimes to less-desirable locations. You may find yourself thousands of miles from family and friends, with little or no safety net when you need help with your health, hardships, or kids.

This is all manageable. In many ways, single parenthood isn't terribly different from having a deployed spouse. But there is one enormous difference, agreed to by most spouses I've met in the military: The career path suddenly sucks.

Think about it. If you're a professional, you build up a clientele in the area you live in. Office worker: you want to move up the ladder in a company. Teacher: you're certified for one or maybe two states. But in almost every career, you're tied to a specific geographical location if you want to advance in your job. You may be able to move to a different region and transfer your job to another branch, but you still have to be able to select the area of the country you're moving to.

Enter the military into your life. Suddenly, you have little or no control over where you're going to live. Your spouse may be able to determine your posting to a limited degree, but what if your company doesn't have a branch in Sugar Creek, Albuquerque, or Pensacola? If he chooses an overseas posting for professional reasons, or the needs of the military dictate he move to Alaska and then has an unaccompanied tour to Korea?

When I got into this myself, I didn't think it would be a big deal. I have great skills and a college degree. For years, though I'd restlessly moved from job to job, I had always increased my base wage, sometimes as much as fifty percent. I would not, I thought, have trouble moving around with portable computer skills.

I did not count on three things. First, in my previous positions, it was easy to pick up the phone and call the guy across the city to check on my performance. It's harder for someone 900 miles away to verify they're talking to an actual employer. Second, I ran into bias against me, both as a military spouse (they have a bad reputation in some regions) and because I have a fairly strong Kentucky accent - similar to Loretta Lynn's. Third, military spouses move a lot. When a prospective employer finds out you're a milspouse, he assumes immediately - and usually correctly - that you will not be staying long.

Suddenly, my wage offerings were halved or worse. That's if I could get an interview. Many of the regions I moved to were hurting for employees, but it still took months for even a temp agency to place me. Find a job on my own? Forget it! I tried the meager services offered by the base - but they were primarily focused toward people who needed entry-level jobs, not those like me who had significant experience already.

At last, I gave up and moved online. I found that I was not alone.

Military Spouses Online - And Independent

Do a quick survey of online workers - writers, web designers, programmers, and others - and you'll find time after time that owners of small-time online businesses are military spouses, or started their businesses while they were military spouses.

Having your own online business eliminates most of the problems faced by military spouses in the employment market. Your business moves with you. You can operate from virtually anywhere, even on vacation or while traveling. Your spouse is deploying? The kids can stay home with you while you write or design or sell or auction or whatever it is you do.

Privately, spouses are trying to help fellow spouses find jobs and training doing these online jobs, or finding other work at home. In Denver, one spouse - not coincidentally, a previous Secretary of Labor in Puerto Rico - started a group to find military spouses customer-service call center work at home. This is the direction the military should be moving in.

Alas, the powers that be in the military are hopelessly old-fashioned. Though they have a task force focused on spouse employment, the answers they are providing mostly aim in three directions: first, for spouses to run home daycares (while many women are suited for this, I'd lose my mind). Second, for spouses to find work in the government system, starting as low-paid G-2 employees at the commissary (McDonald's pays more). Or third, for them to work with temporary agencies - giving them the opportunity to work jobs that will never get better and never provide independent benefits. It's a system that ensures military spouses remain dependent on their husbands, isolating them even further in a lifestyle that already uproots women and children for long stretches of time.

Instead of being trapped in this life, I urge military spouses to look at the hundreds of online opportunities available: writing (like here), website design, small home crafts businesses, data entry, transcription, eBay businesses, and others. By moving to the virtual world, the military spouse can create her own professional niche that moves with her when her husband is transferred, providing at least some stability in an unstable lifestyle.