Face to Screen

HOLD THE PHONE Fifty percent of the US workforce holds a job that is compatible with at least partial telecommuting. And as these professionals show the number of professions in which one can telecommute is growing

E lizabeth Rosenzweig works out of her home in Toronto. But her clients hail from all over the world — the Caribbean Italy England Spain Kenya Zambia Malaysia the Philippines and Costa Rica. “I’ve worked with families and professionals in every inhabited continent on Earth ” says Elizabeth who is a speech language pathologist a listening and spoken language specialist and a certified auditory verbal therapist.

She rattles off some statistics: Three in 1000 babies are born with hearing loss and 90 percent of parents of children with hearing loss choose for their children to learn to communicate via listening and speaking (versus needing visual cues like lip reading or sign language). The problem is that there aren’t enough certified auditory verbal therapists to meet families’ needs. “Working via teletherapy allows me to provide services to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them” says Elizabeth who’s fluent in both English and Spanish.

Elizabeth never planned on being one of the 63 million people projected to telecommute this year alone. “I actually wanted to go into private practice” she says. “But teletherapy made sense because my husband and I were relocating for his job.”