What are the best part-time jobs for pregnant women?

Being pregnant doesn’t mean you have to stop working. However, you might prefer a part-time gig that has a flexible schedule, is not strenuous, and doesn’t require a customer-facing position. We’re going to take a look at some of the best options for part-time jobs for pregnant women. Of course, you don’t have to be pregnant to take these jobs either!

Where to find part-time jobs for pregnant women

If traveling back and forth to a workplace and having to deal with uncomfortable office furniture is unappealing, don’t worry. The best place to find part-time jobs if you are pregnant is in the comfort of your own home. There are now many online stay at home jobs in this day and age.

We will focus mostly on casual jobs where you can earn at least something close to minimum wage. This means we won’t discuss working for scraps or filling out surveys for “beer money”. There are also self-employment opportunities, like starting your own business or trying to monetize a personal blog. However, these approaches take a lot of focused effort to get a decent pay for the amount of time you put in. We will also avoid multi-level marketing schemes or those commission-based sales jobs that require you to pay money upfront. Any company that makes you pay to work is probably a scam!

Instead, we’ll focus more on mini-contract style tasks, where you complete short assignments for a reasonable amount of pay. These give you the flexibility to pick and choose short tasks, take a break, and work at your own pace. Let’s take a look at some of the main types of part-time jobs you can get working from home.

Freelance writing

We’ve already covered some tips for freelance writing in another post, so we won’t add much more here. Your options are to work with a large content mill, a freelance market to find your own clients, or a smaller agency. There are pros and cons to each approach, and of course, different pay levels depending on your experience and skill.

While freelance writing is a great part-time gig, we will point out that you are usually working directly with clients. This means you will have deadlines to meet, revisions to make, and potentially a little bit of stress to keep your clients happy. If you have taken on a long or recurring assignment, your client will not be thrilled if you decide to put the project on hold whenever you want. Just keep this in mind if you are pregnant and signing up for long-term work.

Writing projects also tend to come in at least 1-2 hour chunks. That is, each writing job you take is probably a few hours worth of commitment. Some other kinds of jobs, like transcription, can be broken up to even smaller “bites” of work, which better accommodates stop and go schedules. Other jobs are also less personal in that there is no direct client other than the umbrella company. It’s easier to take time off and come back whenever you want in that sort of situation.

Although we recommend standing desks most of the time for writing, in the case of pregnancy and childcare, sit down at a desk and make yourself comfortable!

Online transcription jobs

Online transcription is one of the best paying jobs you can do at home, especially if you are good at transcription. The challenges are that transcription is very skill and detailed-oriented. You must be able to follow a style guide accurately. If you hate dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s, this is not a good part-time job for you. Transcription companies are extremely strict.

You might also find that you are bad at listening and typing. For those that can master transcription, though, you can definitely earn a living wage from the comfort of home.

The best company for freelance transcription jobs is Rev.com. They have the highest pay and best working conditions. You can find reviews of what it’s like to work for them on glassdoor.com, and most of the reviews are fairly positive. The downside is that everyone wants to work at Rev.com, so it can be difficult to pass their test and get your application accepted. As we said, they are very strict about standards. We recommend that you practice your transcription skills at other places while keep trying to applying to Rev.com.

Some other online transcription sites include:

• Scribie. Scribie may have easier standards than other transcription sites, but they also pay less.
• GoTranscript. The audio quality here is often lower than at Rev, and thus more difficult and time-consuming to complete accurately.
• TranscribeMe. TranscribeMe also has complaints from workers about low quality audio clips.

Tips for making more money with online transcription

• Read and follow the style guidelines carefully. If you work quality is too low, you will not be able to access the hire paying jobs. At many companies, the best performers can also begin editing other people’s work for higher pay.
• Speed without sacrificing accuracy is crucial to increasing your earnings. You MUST learn to touch type. Transcription pros further learn to use text expanders. Text expanders are little codes that speed up your typing. For example, if you type “idk” the software automatically fills in “I don’t know”. You can setup text expansion in Microsoft Word (a guide here) or install a Chrome plugin (found here). Using text expansion, pros often type fast enough to have to speed up the audio.
• If working through your browser, get the Audio EQ Chrome add-on to clear up your audio. While your at it, you should also get the Grammarly Chrome add-on for fixing mistakes.
• Since you will be doing a LOT of typing, make sure you have a comfortable and ergonomic keyboard to avoid injuries and improve your typing speed. Most ergonomic-style keyboards will be good to start, but later consider upgrading to a Das mechanical keyboard for the fastest and most comfortable typing.
• Use a good pair of headphones and work in a quiet place.
• Professional transcribers use foot pedals with transcribing software, like this one. Once you try a foot pedal, you will wonder how you used to work without one.

Leapforce Search Engine Evaluator

If you haven’t heard of Leapforce, you might think it sounds like some suspicious sales agency. However, Leapforce is a contractor for one of the richest companies in the world: Google. The reason you probably haven’t heard of Leapforce is that Google and Leapforce are very secretive about the work they do. It’s almost impossible to find public accounts of detailed working experiences, as you must sign a non-disclosure agreement before starting.

Leapforce involves testing Google’s search engine results. As you might imagine, Google is very secretive about the nature of their search engine algorithm and how it works. Their work requires highly educated, detail-oriented employees and can be done a on a flexible part-time basis. Leapforce can pay about $13-18 per hour, which is decent. However, training takes a very long time. Tasks involve checking search engine results and manually assessing the quality of websites.

Because Leapforce is very secretive, it’s hard to find details about the work online. Here are some sources for finding out more:

• Glassdoor.com has reviews of working conditions at Leapforce.
• This older blog post details some of the downsides for Leapforce.
• Quora has an article on what it’s like to work at Leapforce.

Leapforce has some interesting opportunities, especially for multi-lingual and international people. For example, they always need more Spanish and Chinese speaking workers, presumably to improve their foreign language search engine results.

Best part-time jobs for pregnant women

There are other types of online jobs, such as online tutoring, freelance programming, and so on. However, other types of jobs may require too much client engagement or are more difficult to do on an ad hoc basis. We feel that computer-based piecemeal work, like transcription and search engine evaluation, is better suited for pregnant women looking for part-time work. These jobs still paying much higher rates than surveys, mTurk, or other “beer money” sites. Anyone can give these types of jobs a try for making extra money at home in a convenient fashion.

Further reading

If you are anxious about becoming pregnant, visit our pregnancy worries portal, or check out our article on the most accurate pregnancy tests. You can also read about success stories from mother entrepreneurs and stay at home business owners.