What skills or knowledge are required

Very little, other than Internet surfing, basic ‘MS Word’ and ‘MS Excel’. There are a no. of Indian BPOs who provide ‘typing’ or ‘form filling’ jobs, and all they require is a PC with Internet connection to send and receive work. The most organized and large-scale Indian BPO appears to be ‘Global Info Service’ (www. 365jobs4u.com) based at Ahemdabad, with a London office. Besides ‘typing’ they offer ‘form filling’ and a variety of other jobs we will talk about later. However, the forms are to be filled up ‘online’, i.e, accessing the forms right from their Website by using your registered member ‘Username’ and ‘Password’. ‘Username’ and ‘Password’ are codes made of alphanumeric characters, i.e, using the letters of the alphabet and the 9 digits 1 – 9 - ‘punctuation marks’ are also allowed to certain extent in some cases Some sites permit use of other characters like ‘underscore’ (_) or ‘hyphen’ ( - ). You may have to be ready to fill up such ‘username’ and ‘password’ right when you register at the BPO’s website, or they may ask you to do it later by sending a confirmatory E-Mail, or they may allot them for you, as ‘Global Info Service’ does. This BPO has been on the scene for years, and have a separate ‘Report Creator’ job similar to the online ‘form filling’ job. Their ‘form filling’ job consists of filling up 1-page forms similar to the forms you fill up when registering for an E-Maill Address or applying for jobs, and the work is made easier by supplying you with a software you have to download, which allows you to automatically fill up common standardized details repeated in successive forms, like your name, address, etc., leaving you to fill up only that part of each form which is specific to each form; the software is provided at no extra cost. This allows filling up each form within about 1 min. You have to fill up at least 1000 forms a month, while the maximum you can access and fill up depends on the Plan you choose while registering and paying – higher the payment you desire, higher the registration fee, and higher the payment per form filled up – as much as Rs. 8/- per form if you pay Rs. 4000 as fees, with maximum potential earning of Rs. 48,000 per month! The ‘Report Creator’ job however involves opening E-Mails sent by ‘Global Info’ every day by connecting their server to your PC, and transferring specified data there to MS Excel or MS Word tabular format, containing 5 – 8 columns. The minimum and maximum stipulations and corresponding fees and earning potential are even higher than the ‘form filling’ job – the maximum being more than Rs. 65,000 per month, provided you can fill up about 400-450 rows of the specified MS Excel Table per month, each row containing 5 columns, per day!

However, these are about 6-month old data on ‘Global Info’, and you may check the latest offerings and plans from their website – www.365jobs4u.com

The nature of ‘form filling’ work offered earlier by ‘Global Info Service’ used to be called ‘Report Creator’ job on their site, and an idea of this job could be perceived by clicking the ‘Report Creator’ menu or button otheir site, then clickin the ‘Demo’ option. The job was titled ‘Report Creator’ because the data to be filled in various columns of a Table in either MS Word or Excel format, used to be a summarized ‘report’ of Ads posted on various Websites – the date posted, website address where posted, etc (This is a separate type of job – more on it later). The no. of forms to be filled up was considerable – typically 100-200 per day, each form consisting of minimum 5 columns. Of course, here you often enjoy the convenience of simply copying the data to be entered in the different ‘fields’ or columns from the E-Mails sent to you and then pasting them into your MS Word or Excel cells; you can simultaneously view and work on both the E-Mails and the Table where you have to enter the data, by splitting your computer screen horizontally into 2 halves and then opening the 2 different Applications in the 2 halves (Open any application first, then right click on the horizontal bar at the bottom of your screen, then click on “Tile windows horizontally”).

However, now the job appears to have changed to converting photo or scanned images accessed by logging in to the site’s ‘members area’ to typed paragraphs. Moreover, now ;form filling’ jobs offered by various sites or ‘work-at-home’ job providers turns out to be nothing but ‘Ad Posting’, on which we will discuss later.