TelCoa at the Digital City Expo

Following is an outline of the panel discussion led by

              THE TELEWORK COALITION:

Good Jobs, They Are Closer Than They Appear; Telework, It Puts Communities to Work!

This opening session will examine the technologies, policies, and procedures you need to take advantage of

the new digital economy and bring employment opportunities to your community.

By using the newest technologies, including broadband, governments at all levels can bring well-paid jobs to their communities. Technology and training now make it make it possible for your workers to compete with both offshore and other labor sources.

For example, call center operators in both the private and public sector, have started to realize the compelling bottom line benefits of a reliable and anxious distributed workforce, using the virtual home-based call center model to replace costly bricks and mortar centers. These home-based workers could be in your community.

More medical employment and corresponding benefits to the citizens of your community can become a reality, too. Patients can be diagnosed and treatment, often life-saving, can be administered locally. Diagnostic and consulting services, not normally cost justifiable in some communities, can be provided by doctors in medical facilities hundreds of miles away.

Life-long education and re-education opportunities will keep the skills of the workers in your community current. Because today's digital economy is changing so rapidly, job skills need to be constantly updated to help keep workers employable. The same technologies that bring jobs and medical benefits can bring these continuing educational opportunities.

Additional employment activities that can be effectively and economically performed from home range from analysis of references, inventory, data bases and credit reports, to writing RFPs, evaluations, presentations, copy, and answering e-mail. These services, when provided virtually and locally, will help to prevent population flight to traditional centers of employment and thus will stabilize your tax base.