With the gruesome job loss statistics that have piled up since mid 2008; you may be among the many U.S. citizens recently ‘unemployed’. By now, you could be looking seriously at career change ideas.

A lot of career people polled, have revealed their job search has been ongoing for upwards of a year and more. Congress has made it easier by extending unemployment benefits for the eligible, but where does that leave you in the long term outlook?

Career change ideas usually mean tooling up for some retraining and upgrading of specific skills that enhance your marketability and hire-ability. Unless you’re prepared to go further in debt or find some career advancement programs that are State-funded; this could imply further out-of-pocket expenses for a budget already impacted by job loss and/or reduced household income.

If you’ve been job hunting long, you have already been frustrated by the reality that our economy has definitely imploded in certain sectors. Your old position may never come back in quite the way you imagine. It may be time to “re-purpose” your skill set. This implies leveraging and repackaging your career experience in transferable, alternative and creative career avenues that you might not have considered before.

One thing is for sure. The Internet is offering unprecedented ways to gain exposure to prospective employers and listing your career resume′ online. Using the web to job prospect and list your bonafides is vital and universal – virtually a necessity if you want to get noticed. Social networking sites, job forums and online information clearing-house web sites can be a boon to the career change seeker.

My career change ideas have taken me from simple job replacement to exploring the concepts of three alternative career areas that you might also add to your list of possibilities.

Outsourcing and Freelancing

The fact is that many companies in today’s global economy have been forced to cut back on their labor pool in hopes of staying competitive and profitable. This has also meant that they outsource job placement and use temporary and part time positions to streamline their workforce.

It’s more tolerable holding a part time or unstable temp-job if you can make-the-most of your time spent. Learning “value-added” skills that will hold their own in any career portfolio while (temporarily) stuck in a less-than-ideal job position can either leverage or enhance a situation that would otherwise stall your career progress.

If you’re essentially marketing yourself already in basic job search mode, what about re-positioning yourself as an independent contractor rather than simply a job hunter?

You “re-frame” yourself as someone that employers can outsource-to, instead of having to hire you as an “employee”. They might find it easier to award you a specific task within a project if they know they’re not committing to a permanent position. When you deliver positively on the contract, who knows what it will lead to?

What I’m really talking about here is transitioning to your own business. Check out the freelancing possibilities. The web has introduced unimaginable opportunities inaccessible until now. You can take on various outsourced projects and not even live in the same city as the employer.

Once you change your mind-set from the “employee mentality’ to being a business owner or independent contractor/freelancer, you might discover all sorts of ways of financing your new-found freelance status.

The two other areas I’ve found to be effective income multipliers that can help finance your alternative career path as an independent freelancer are; (internet-based) affiliate marketing and network marketing, or any combination of both that is appropriate to your particular career niche.

For instructive online examples of how to creatively add multiplexed revenue streams to your own career change ideas, view the web pages of some contemporaries who are actively pursuing the freelancer lifestyle. Maybe their online efforts will get your creative juices flowing. See how you can adapt their model to help bolster your own career transition.

Ken Mueller is a freelance web publisher and author. He lives in Montana and spends time networking with affiliate wizards bent on liberating the world from job drudgery overlords. For more career change ideas, and a chance to share your comments on your own alternative career change options and experience, visit http://www.altcareerchange.com