Get work sitting at home.

Outsourcing is not reserved for just big firms like GenPact. Professionals around the world are making primary or secondary careers out of bidding for assignments from home from clients globally through websites enabling such a marketplace. And Indians are uniquely positioned to successfully bid for many of these, especially technical ones, for the same reasons that have made the country’s software industry what it is. High skills and lower rates are still in fashion.

Elance.com, one of the leading sites where one can find work sitting at home, in its recently published ‘Elance Online Work Index’ has come up with the following key findings:

Companies and consultants are looking for and getting help building world-class websites, hiring experts in PHP (#2), MySQL (#3), HTML (#6), CSS (#8), XHTML (#17), Joomla (#19) and AJAX (#25). The figures in the brackets indicate the rank of the category in terms of popularity. For example, PHP ranks second after only Graphic Design.

Graphic Design (#1) tops the charts with huge demand from companies and agencies for creative services including Logo Design (#4), Adobe Illustrator (#9), Photoshop (#11), and Flash (#12).

Marketers have discovered the customer acquisition power of great online content, and consequently, content creation skills are hot including Article Writing (#5), Web Content (#7), WordPress (#10), Blogs (#13), Online Writing (#22), and eBooks (#26).

Generating top line revenue is on everyone’s mind, and as such businesses are hiring people with the skills to drive revenue including Search Engine Optimization (#15), Lead Generation (#16), Marketing Strategy (#18), Sales (#27), and Market Research (#29).

With shrinking budgets and growing work loads, marketing and IT departments are increasingly turning to online work as an alternative to hiring full-time. Online work allows businesses to connect with independent professionals to get their work done while maintaining flexibility. In February 2009, companies posted 23,000 new jobs on Elance, building on the 250,000 jobs and $100m worth of online work posted on Elance in the last 12 months.

Likewise, a service like RentACoder focuses only on technical projects. One can even scan similar sites like GetAFreelancer, LimeExchange and Guru or general classifieds ones like CraigsList to find work of all kinds. In a nutshell, if you go looking you could just land yourself any kind of work from around the world.

These sites broadly work in the following way: You can create a free account, publicise your talents in your resume, bid for projects that are posted on these and get paid if your bid is successful and you complete the project. Clients deposit the money with these sites in an escrow account, and you get paid after a handling charge of 7-15 percent is deducted by the site. This does not happen on Craigslist though – you have to enter into individual agreements and hope they are honoured.

However, one must remember that simply getting started as a freelancer today can be tough. Many professionals start out by offering their services for free to build up a portfolio, testimonials and clients. If one can afford to do this it's a good way to get started, knowing that paid opportunities will present themselves once you build a reputation.