Anyone here have any experience with work from home programs? I'm looking for something for a homebound family member, and it needs to not require high speed internet or being on the phone all the time. Searching around, it looks like there may be a decent amount of scams in this area.

Do they have any skills that may be marketable in the form of their own business?

Nothing real suitable for starting a home business. Ideally, this is just a temporary thing, to help bring in some money and fill idle time.

I know a lot of 'traditional' companies are doing a lot more work at home type stuff. In my company a lot of engineering, programming, and design jobs are applicable for the virtual work program. I have friends at other aerospace companies (GE Aviation comes to mind) that have remote programs also.

It doesn't sound like that is quite the answer you are looking for. It is hard to say without knowing the qualifications of the person, but I'd say just look for a 'normal' job and see if it can be done remotely.

You just eliminated like 99% of all legitimate stay at home jobs.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of data entry or editing or writing job.

That was my fear, but I've heard of some companies that mail you stuff to do, then you send it back. I'll dig deeper this weekend.

I spent part of the summer between school and uni at home putting together welcome packs for French pagers, the work was pretty tedious, but it kept me out of trouble and I ended up with enough money for a decent pair of speakers and a minidisc deck for my hifi which I took to uni.

My mum found the job in the classified ad's in the local paper, the company was actually a fairly ordinary printing firm but they employed a whole bunch of people that worked from home doing collating work like this.

I get the feeling that nowadays they simply employ someone in a sweatshop in India to do that sort of stuff. I might've thought I was working for peanuts but it's probably a lot more than what they'd get for the same job. Come to think of it, I can't remember whether I was paid cash in hand for the work.

I would love to find something too for me to earn extra money. Whenever I look I just find scams though.

This looks like a legitimate place to do some research.