Employee engagement is recovering since the end of the recession, new research from Gallup shows, but the improvement is uneven: Those higher up the corporate ladder are experiencing much greater gains than the people they supervise.

Engagement rose in eight out of nine sectors measured, with “managers, executives and officials” recording the most dramatic increase: 10 percentage points between 2009 and 2012.

By contrast, workers in manufacturing and sales — the next two highest improvers — had increases of six and five percentage points, respectively. People in other fields including transportation, installation and repair, clerical and office, professional, and construction and mining jobs were all slightly more engaged than they were in 2009.

“It is possible that, amid tough economic times, managers and executives are increasingly motivated to drive a sense of purpose in their organizations,“ Gallup said. The research organization also suggested that executives might be more optimistic about the recovering economy or might experience a greater sense of control than their underlings.

This last possibility is likely, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I suspect that they feel empowered in the current situation,” he said via email. “While managers might be relatively secure in their jobs, most other workers are not.”

This hunch appears to be borne out by the one outlier in Gallup’s survey: service jobs, where a complete reversal has taken place. Three years ago, these employees were the most engaged; today, this is the only sector where engagement fell.

“During the recession people were happy just to have a job,” said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics. “Now, those that are most marketable are feeling more confident in their options.”

A report last year from the National Employment Law Project found that employment gains in the years following the recession have disproportionately been in lower-paying fields, many of them in the service industry.

“Lower-wage occupations constituted 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth,” the group said. Between 2010 and 2012, 1.7 million jobs — 43 percent of net employment growth — came in the food services, retail, and employment services sectors.

With low pay, minimal benefits and erratic hours, these aren’t what most Americans would consider great jobs, and even an increase of 1.7 million leaves a significant overflow of jobseekers.

Employers can afford to be choosy, and replacing departing workers isn’t a challenge in these lower-skilled industries. Employees know this, and that uncertainty is a contributor to their falling engagement, Lister said. “There’s a lot of fear remaining.”

“It is much easier to be engaged in a job that you expect to hold for the foreseeable future (than) a job that you could lose at any time,” Baker said.

Tara Sophia Mohr is the founder of the Playing Big leadership program for women. Her "Women’s School to Work Guide" shows women how to shake up their good student habits to begin playing bigger at work. Here’s an excerpt:

In my work helping women build successful, fulfilling careers, I started to see something quite interesting: women who had been high achievers in school were finding that the very skills that served them well in school were holding them back in their careers.

Success at work demands different competencies than success at school, and many women aren’t aware that they need to shift their approach.

Below are five new skills women need in the workplace — skills that tend to be the very opposite of what we learned in school.  

1. Influence authority. In school, each class brought a new authority figure — the teacher — who had unique rules, requirements and preferences. As students, we get really good at figuring out what each authority figure wants and to provide it. Yet to have brilliant careers, we must learn to not only please the authority figures — but to challenge and influence too. Today, when you hold a different view than the authority figure in your midst, see how you can influence him or her by diplomatically sharing your point of view.
2. Improvise. In school, we learn how to prepare: how to study for the test, to do the reading the night before, to be ready with the answer when the teacher asks for it in class. This can lead us to feel confident only when we’ve had a lot of time to prepare. Yet brilliant careers require that we think on our feet again and again. Get as good at improvisation as you are at preparation. Today, embrace an opportunity to improvise at work.
3. Get uncomfortable. In school, you probably got comfortable with the routine of studying, test-taking, paper writing, without having to take too many risks along the way to succeed. In our careers, we have to get comfortable with risk-taking, with feeling afraid and moving forward anyway, with leaving our comfort zones. Today, take one action that stretches you out of your comfort zone and that will help you realize your professional dreams.
4. Self-promote. In school, if you did good work, you usually got a good grade, but in our careers, we’ve got to do good work and make sure people know about it. This can be an uncomfortable stretch for women, because we don’t want to come off as arrogant or as taking credit away from others. Today, find one opportunity to graciously let others know about one of your recent successes.
5. Look inward. School taught you how to absorb external information (from a book or a teacher’s lesson) and then regurgitate that information back out. As you move to more senior levels in your career, you’ll need to turn your focus inward and learn to trust what you already know. Today, notice when you default to looking outward for the answers, and turn inward to see where your thoughts lead you instead.

Want more? Go to www.taramohr.com/gettheguide to download Tara's free "Women's School to Work Guide."

More:

• '10 Rules for Brilliant Women': Creating a vision for your life
• Sheryl Sandberg's book offers career advice — for both sexes
• Study predicts billion-woman surge in workplace
• CNBC video: How to mobilize the female work force

Pascal Lauener / Reuters

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in this January 25, 2013, file photo.

Ever since the world got wind of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book  “Lean In,” which landed on store shelves Monday, it’s been viewed as a sort of modern-day feminist manifesto of how women can get ahead in the corporate world.

And while it is that in many respects, it can also be seen as a good, common-sense approach to career advancement, for either gender.

Some academics are finding it's providing a good springboard for the discussion.

Pulin Sanghvi, assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said he liked Sandberg’s message of developing your own greatness on your own terms. Leaders are rewarded for their “spikiness,” he said, rather than their well-rounded skills.

Filled with studies to back up her anecdotes, Sandberg refrains from whining about workplace inequality. Instead, she offers dozens of techniques that can level the playing field faster.

She gives specific examples of changes that can be made by men (hire and promote women, share household chores with your spouse), companies (offer paid personal time off, engineer less rigid schedules) and government (support affordable child care). Mainly, however, it’s about how women (or men) can work the system even if it’s broken.

Here are some of Sandberg’s pointers:

• Seek a job at a fast-growing company because there will be more opportunities than at a place that is stagnant or shrinking. "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask what seat, you just get on," she writes that Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said in persuading her to work at the company.
• Pay attention and make your own opportunities. Sandberg writes that “increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.”
• Don’t talk yourself out of applying for a job if you don’t have 100 percent of the skills. Sandberg cites a 2008 study at Hewlett-Packard that found women only apply for a job if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria. Men apply if they think they meet 60 percent of the requirements. “I want to do that – and I’ll learn by doing it,” is the more successful mindset.
• Women may have to ask for a raise differently than men. Sandberg cites a study that shows women touting their own success are seen as pushy. One trick is to advocate for yourself as a strong member of a team that deserves the reward. Say, "We had a great year," versus, "I had a great year." Here, Sandberg explains a central point of her book: "I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations," but it's a means to an end, she argues, and it won't always have to be this way.
• Prioritize. In her “Myth of Doing It All” chapter, Sandberg quotes Dr. Laura Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, who admits to not keeping her linens perfectly folded all the time. “I had to decide what mattered and what didn’t and I learned to be a perfectionist in only the things that mattered,” Glimcher said.
• Don’t ask a stranger to mentor you. Instead, ask smart questions to get noticed. In one example, Sandberg notices a junior employee leaving a conference room armed with a succinct, casual-sounding question for a manager. She also cites a woman she met at a conference, Clara Shih of Hearsay Social, who followed up with a series of short emails with thoughtful questions she could not get answered elsewhere.
• When starting out, think of child care costs as an investment. While you may only break even at the start, eventually your salary will rise, making the child care costs a smaller percentage of your paycheck.
• “Employees who concentrate on results and impact are the most valuable,” Sandberg writes. One example she uses is from Lori Goler, who was then the senior director of marketing at eBay. Her job pitch to Sandberg was basically, “What is your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” Goler was hired to run recruiting at Facebook.
• Get more sleep to become a better problem solver.

Of course we’re more productive — we’re always “at work.”

In the wake of Yahoo and Best Buy ordering telecommuters back to the office, one of the strongest arguments for working from home is that it increases productivity. While nixing the commute and eliminating distractions certainly helps, there’s also another reason why the home office is so good for productivity.

The ubiquity of mobile devices today means that the “home office” has become more of a concept than a place. The dark underbelly of greater flexibility is that we find ourselves checking and responding to work email when we’re at the gym, out on dates and watching our kids’ soccer games.

“The technology that’s happened over the last decade or so is tremendous... but at the same time, I feel constantly connected now,” said James Wagner, a salesman at Rema Foods in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., who upgraded to a new BlackBerry about a year ago.

“You get conditioned to constantly be looking at the thing. For example, I get up in the morning... I’m literally still in bed and I’m checking emails.”

Statistics indicate that Wagner has plenty of company. Market research firm IDC predicts that 137 million smartphones will be shipped to the United States this year, a 14 percent increase over last year. According to the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, and 31 percent own a tablet. College graduates and those whose annual household income is $75,000 or more are much likelier to own a smartphone.

As technology advances, mobile devices can do more — which lets us do more. In particular, the road to constant connectivity is paved with iPads.

“The smartphone is a little too little, the laptop is a little too big,” said Gil Gordon, author of "Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career." A tablet “hits the sweet spot there... Things you probably wouldn’t think of doing with a smartphone you can do on an iPad and don’t think twice about it.”

“Total USA tablet shipments reached 45.2 million units in 2012, up from 32.4 million in 2011,” Tom Mainelli, IDC Research Director, Tablets, said via email. “We're forecasting the U.S. market to hit 62.6 million units in 2013.”

Stefani Stankiewicz, an account manager at Manning Automotive Marketing in Wyckoff, N.J., replaced her Droid with an iPhone and got an iPad about a year ago. “I can do a lot more with the iPhone,” she said. “It’s a blessing and a curse.” 

Stankiewicz said her devices give her near-constant contact with her job. “I have a G-chat app... Yesterday, I left early because my grandfather was in the hospital, and I was G-chatting with everybody,” she said.

American workers have been sold a promise that the constant access afforded by our mobile devices would give us more flexibility as to where and when we worked. The problem is that all these late-night and weekend emails aren’t replacing hours spent in the office — they’re adding to them.

“I call it my necessary evil,” Wagner said. “If I didn’t do that and keep up, it would be impossible to keep up with what’s getting thrown at me every day.”

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that between half and two-thirds of telecommuting hours are on top of a standard 40-hour workweek. “The ability of employees to work at home may actually allow employers to raise expectations for work availability during evenings and weekends and foster longer workdays and workweeks,” researchers warned.

While we could just turn off those devices when we’re eating dinner or on vacation, we don’t. A Salary.com survey found that a third of people say they feel anxious when they can’t check their work email or voicemail for an “extended” period of time.

For an upcoming vacation, Stankiewicz said she planned to not check her work email, but admitted she might cave. “I’m going to really try not to. I might peek and check just to see what’s going on... because it’s right there.”

“It’s a double edged sword,” said Rob Smith, co-author of "Telework: A Critical Component of Your Total Rewards Strategy." “The technology has advanced more quickly than the policies and procedures in the workplace that would allow for a proper work-life balance. We haven’t found that right balance yet.”

Companies generally don’t come out and say they want their employees on-call 24/7, but some workers say there are clear signs from management that answering emails outside of work hours is encouraged if not outright expected.

Knowing that the boss is burning the midnight oil, for instance, can make employees feel obligated to do the same. Wagner said it wasn’t uncommon for his company’s president, with whom he works closely, to send him multiple emails on Sunday nights.

"He certainly works as hard as anyone... Without saying it, he certainly likes when you respond at any time. He likes to see that his people are always connected,” he said.

“In this economy, with so many people out of work, they’re almost afraid of not being seen as accessible and available and responsive,” Gordon said. “So they let the technology intrude at the dinner table or their kid’s soccer game.”

This spillover can cause tension in people’s personal relationships. “We’ll be sitting there, having dinner, and it’ll be sitting on the table,” Wagner said of his omnipresent BlackBerry. “My wife... has literally held it over a toilet before.”

“My boyfriend does complain that I’m on my phone answering emails a lot,” Stankiewicz said. “Am I being more productive or am I stopping myself from having a social life?”

Most men and women who appear to be successfully climbing the corporate ladder say they can “have it all” — but maybe not all at the same the time.

A new, international survey of managers and executives at big companies finds that about 7 in 10 of the men and women surveyed believe they can have a successful career and family life.

But there is a catch. Half of the executives surveyed on behalf of consulting firm Accenture conceded that although you could have both professional success and a family life, you cannot have it all at the same time.

The online survey of 4,100 executives in 33 countries was conducted in November of 2012. The respondents included professionals such as managers, vice presidents and owners or partners at medium to large organizations. It had a two percentage point margin of error.

The Accenture survey did offer evidence that many are at least striving for a successful work/life balance. When the professionals were asked what they define as career success, the most popular answer was “work/life balance,” with about 56 percent of the vote.

That beat out even “money,” which got 46 percent of the vote. The respondents were allowed to give more than one answer.

In addition, about half said they had turned down or not pursued a job because of concerns about work/life balance.

The survey comes amid a heated debate over whether ambitious, career-minded men and women can balance success at work with success at home.

Former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter sparked a huge debate last year when she argued in The Atlantic that women still can’t have it all, at least in the United States.

More recently, Yahoo Chief Executive — and new mom — Marissa Mayer also created a stir when her company ordered telecommuting workers to start coming into the office. Many argued that such a directive is a major blow to parents who are trying to balance work, family and long commutes.

The debate isn’t just confined to women. These days, many dads also are struggling to "have it all."

Forget the corner office. In 2013, the most coveted workspace is a worker’s own kitchen table or home office.

Nearly a week after a leaked memo revealed that Yahoo employees with work-from-home arrangements would need to show up in the office every day starting in June, smaller tech companies are attempting to woo disgruntled telecommuters.

Earlier this week, Drew Anderson, CTO of digital media startup Hitlab USA Inc., posted an ad on Craigslist with "Yahoo Telecommuters Welcome" in the title.

Within two days, Anderson received between 100 and 200 replies — up to 10 times his usual response rate. "A handful" of applicants, he said, were current Yahoo employees.

Anderson said his ad also was yielding a better caliber of job applicants. "The range of experience is wider and just the general response has been very good," he said. "I’m using the event as leverage... It’s a great tool for me."

Shortly after the memo was leaked, some companies took to Twitter to invite Yahoo employees to come work for them.

Marc Garrett, CEO of software developer Intridea, touted his company’s flexible arrangements:

Hey #Yahoos: if you're being forced to quit come work with us @intridea. We all work from home!

So did Sara Rosso, an employee of Automattic, which runs the popular WorldPress content management system:

Disappointed in @marissamayer's ban on working remotely ow.ly/hZOzn Yahoo peeps, come to @Automattic! :)

“You want to be able to give people the freedom to work,” said Silke Fleischer, CEO of mobile app developer ATIV Software, based in Santa Rosa, Calif. Ativ’s 11 employees all work remotely. Daily meetings and even job interviews are all conducted over Skype, she said.

While Yahoo’s telework ban might bring back the water cooler conversations, Fleischer said, “We’re on Skype all day long... we’re communicating.” 

What CEO Marissa Mayer did right, experts say, was realize that Yahoo struggled with productivity and collaboration issues, and take steps to fix them. Her mistake was taking those steps in the wrong direction.

“You could have that situation regardless of whether teleworking was going on,” said Dayna Fellows, president of consulting company WorkLife Performance, Inc. Yahoo’s blanket ban on working from home is “a little baby-and-bathwater,” she said, “It’s not going to solve what I think they’re trying to solve.”

On average, office workers spend about 80 percent of their time working on tasks that require concentration and focus, with the remainder collaborative, said Richard Kadzis, spokesman at CoreNet Global, which works with clients on strategic management of corporate real estate and workplace resources. Working from home part of the time lets employees be in the most productive environment to do both, he said. "Distractions are minimized," he said.

Aside from increasing productivity, a good telecommuting program also helps businesses cut costs. Companies in which around a quarter of the workforce works remotely save 10 to 15 percent on their real estate overhead, Kadzis said. 

Fleischer said companies like hers could benefit from Yahoo's new policy. "It could actually free up talent from Yahoo. Smaller companies can’t necessarily offer all these other options," she said. "However, they can offer you the freedom."

Maybe Yahoo should have done its homework before banning work-at-home.

For millions of American companies large and small, telecommuting has become a critical force in boosting worker productivity and growing profits in the information age.

Take the case of Dallas-based Ryan, LLC, the seventh largest corporate tax services firm in the U.S., with more than 900 employees in 45 locations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. In August 2008, the company realized it had a problem. Voluntary turnover was roughly 20 percent. Some employees who quit said the long hours at the office left them little time for a personal life.

“We had a policy that required people to be physically present,” said Delta Emerson, the company’s chief of staff. “If you were not seen, you were questioned as to whether or not you were working.”

The solution: a flexible work schedule that allowed employees to work remotely and set their own hours. Though the transition had its bumps, the results were surprising.

Not only did the work all get done, the company became even more productive. Revenues went up. Client satisfaction went up. And turnover went down.

Emerson said the lesson was that there’s more to productivity than just showing up at the office. Ryan workers know that their job performance is now being measured on how much work they get done, not how reliably they show up at the office, she said.

“Everyone knows what they have to do to cut it,” said Emerson. “But people treasure this flexibility to the point that they will give their all to continue to work in an environment that allows that.”

By focusing more on measuring how well employees are doing their job, and worrying less about where the work gets done, companies with flexible work policies are seeing productivity go up, according to human resources experts.

That may be one more reason American companies are adopting flexible work policies. As of last year, nearly two-thirds of employers offered flexible work rules to at least some of their employees – up from about a third in 2005, according to a national study by the Society for Human Resource Management.

“We don’t see this trend going away,” said Michael Aitken, SHRM’s vice president of government affairs. "This is the way that work will get done in the future. I spend a great deal of time and energy in educating our members about the value that it offers.”

But old perceptions about the distractions of the home office persist. In her now widely-read memo explaining why Yahoo now forbids its employees to work from home, CEO Marissa Mayer explained that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

The vast majority of companies who support flexible work practices, however, disagree. Employees who take advantage of telecommuting and other flexible policies often are more productive than if they worked only at the office, according to SHRM research. Some 97 percent of human resources managers at companies with those policies said that productivity is “the same or better” than with office-only work rules.

By skipping the travel time required to get to the office, telecommuting boosts the number of productive hours each employee can devote to work. In a 2010 study, American Consumer Institute economists Joseph Fuhr and Stephen Pociask calculated that roughly 1.7 trillion minutes are spent commuting every year – at a cost in lost work time and transportation expenses of roughly 7.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

The economic benefits of expanding telecommuting could be huge. The authors estimate that, over 10 years, a 10 percent increase in telecommuting hours would save nearly $100 billion in lost time and expense.

We would all also breathe a little easier. Fuhr and Pociask calculated that by saving 4.4 billion gallons of gasoline, along with the energy savings from reduced office space, a 10 percent increase in hours worked form home over the next decade would reduce greenhouse gas emission by more than half a billion tons of carbon dioxide.

To be sure, not all occupations are well-suited to telecommuting. Waiters and barge pilots aren’t ever going to be very productive working from a home office. But as more occupations become tied to a computer screen for much of the day, it matters less where that screen is situated.

As many home office workers can attest, some work is better performed in a group setting – especially dull, menial tasks where the urge to goof-off and ready distractions are ever present.

That was also the conclusion of a 2012 study by economist Glenn Dutcher at the University of Innsbruck, who found that while telecommuting “has a positive impact on productivity of creative tasks” it has a “negative impact on productivity of dull tasks.” So if your job involves a lot of copying and collating, you’ll probably get more done chatting with co-workers while visiting the water cooler in the copy room.

Mayer also cited those kind of chance encounters in defense of her “everyone back to the office” mandate.

“Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” she wrote.

From TODAY: KLG sticks up for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

But for every serendipitous encounter that sparks the creation of a winning new product, there are many hours wasted sitting in someone else’s unproductive meeting or listening to a cube neighbor justify their picks in the Oscars pool, said Aitken.

“(Telecommuting) allows for less interruption at the office,” he said. “No people swinging by and wanting to talk about what happened over the weekend.”

And while detractors argue that a home office present too many productivity-killing distractions, workers who telecommute are better able to juggle their work and home lives. That helps reduce absenteeism.

“I may want to go to a doctor’s appointment or pick up the dry cleaning or go to my son or daughter’s school play,” said Aitken. “Telecommuting allows that worker the peace of mind to be able to do the things they may need to do for their life side and still meet their work obligations.”

Supporters of flexible work policies say the key to making the transition work is the development of better ways to measure how well their employees are doing. Being the first in the parking lot in the morning and the last to leave at night usually has little to do with how much actual work gets done in between.

“We used to measure people based on hours worked, and the person who worked the most hours was like a hero,” said Emerson. “There was frequently no tie-in related to what else they had done. So people who put in the hours could get away with a lot. Now, we don’t even pay attention to hours anymore. We’re looking at results.”

Related story:

Hey Marissa! Working from home is alive and well

As a growing number of men adopt the role of caregiver to their children or elderly parents, they’re fighting outdated gender norms in the workplace — a battle experts say will eventually usher in changes that benefit both male and female employees.

“Men who do take the time as caregivers are more likely to be seen as less committed to work because they’re violating gender norms,” said Kelli K. Garcia, a former fellow at O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and current adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

“The law does in this country does protect the ability to take leave” for both men and women, said Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I think a lot of companies don’t realize that,” she said.

Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California — Hastings, said both men and women can be subject to what she termed a “flexibility stigma.” It can be an issue for women seeking a part-time or flex-time schedule, but for men, “It’s typically triggered if they even try to take leave,” she said.

Demographic factors are behind the increasing number of men taking on the role of caregiver. The recession relegated many men, especially young men, to periods of unemployment or underemployment. At the same time, women have taken on more of their families’ financial obligations. A Prudential Financial study published last year found that 53 percent of women are the primary breadwinner, and 22 percent make more money than their spouse. “Among female breadwinners, nearly a third say they earn more than their spouse as a direct result of the challenging economy,” the report said.

There also has been a shift in cultural norms that’s propelled men into caregiving roles, said Williams. “A group of young men is really drawing a line in the sand and saying ‘I don’t want to do it the way my father’s generation did it,’” she said. “They’re caught between that ideal and workplaces that haven’t caught up.”

“As women have learned, you have to assert the fact that this is not a ‘choice,’” Appelbaum said. It appears that more of them are doing just that: roughly 12 percent of the lawsuits filed alleging family responsibilities discrimination in the workplace are filed by men.

The experts think this number is bound to grow. According to a study published in 2009 by the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with the AARP, nearly 30 percent of Americans perform at least some caregiving tasks for relatives, and about one-third of caregivers are men. “I think it’s clear that the demands on men as well as women are going to increase in terms of family care,” Appelbaum said.

In California, which began mandating paid family leave in 2004, the effect on men’s participation in caregiving is measurable, Appelbaum said. The number of men taking leave to care for a relative rose slightly between 2004 and 2012, from 30 percent to 33 percent, but the number taking time off after the birth of a child nearly doubled, climbing from 17 percent to 29 percent in that same time. “When we talk to HR managers about this... they told us that once the leaves were paid, it became more acceptable,” Appelbaum said.

Advocates for more flexible workplaces say men’s involvement ultimately will have a snowball effect that will lead to positive change. “The real advantage of having men taking leave is that when the issue of leave and the issue of caregiving is not just a women’s issue, you’re more likely to get good policies and not get gender-based judgments,” Garcia said.

“The more that men start taking leave and it becomes normalized and expected, then those judgments are going to change,” she said. “We’re at a moment where... we have this opportunity to change the workplace culture." 

Are you a great baker and are always told to turn it into a business but don’t know how? Do you have a patented idea but you are not sure about the next step? Please tell us in 200 words or less why you might be stuck and you could be featured on an upcoming segment on TODAY.

If you’re interested in being a part of this project, please e-mail us here. Please give us some details, including where you live, what you or your spouse does for a living and how to best reach you.

Chris Langer / for NBC News

Tutor Ivonne Pinera explains a section of math problem in Spanish to the students preparing for the test to earn their GED in Ohio.

Have you seen those ads that seem to be all over the Internet these days? They say something like "make $1,000 per week from the comfort of your own home." Now it should go without saying that such schemes are not very reliable and should be avoided in most cases. But that still leaves the question: Can you really make money from home?

The truth is, you actually can. But you first have to understand what your skills are and how to market them effectively.

With the economy still struggling and many people faced with underemployment or unemployment, it's understandable that many would show an interest in building an income on their own terms. And even those who currently have work would often prefer to create a career that would allow them to work from home.

[Related Article: 5 Ways to Get Out of Debt: Which Will Work for You?]

So for anyone in those circumstances, here are four of the best ways to make money from home:

1. Become a virtual assistant
What does "virtual assistant" mean? Well, it can refer to any person hired part-time or full-time to provide remote assistance -- usually in a role similar to a traditional administrative assistant. Often, you will work for one person who is very busy -- too busy to handle it all on their own.

And that's where the opportunity is for you. The tasks of a virtual assistant will often include things like screening your boss's e-mail, booking travel, making appointments and phone calls on behalf of your boss, managing his or her calendar, and taking care of other things that come up.

This is a field that is growing surprisingly quickly, and there are many websites where you can find work as a virtual assistant, including Indeed, WAHM and Elance. In most cases, you will need to present a resume and/or show some experience that would prove your ability to handle these types of tasks well.

2. Tap into your creative strengths
Many people enjoy some type of creative outlet, and with the wide availability of opportunities on the Internet, you can frequently turn your creative streak into a source of income. For example, if you like to make crafts then you can use Etsy to build a devoted audience of customers who are willing to pay for your handmade items.

Another obvious option is for people who enjoy writing. There are countless requests on sites like Elance for all different types of writing. Polish your writing ability and then start bidding on some of these writing jobs. At first, you'll be doing this a few hours a week, but over time, you can build up a dedicated clientele and make a full-time living off your writing.

There are some really unexpected ways you can use your creativity to make money from home. One of the more surprising ways to make money would be to look for work as a voice actor -- meaning that you would lend your voice to narrate videos, radio ads, or any other type of media. These freelance jobs can actually pay pretty well. And there are countless other surprising ones like these listed at the sites above.

[Related Article: 3 People Who Dug Out of Deep Debt]

3. Share your skills locally
Sometimes it is necessary to change your perspective in order to see all the skills that you truly have. Do you play an instrument? If so, you could no doubt teach music lessons to young people (or anyone) in your community. All you'd need to do beforehand is a bit of lesson planning. You can even offer a discount for the first 10 people who sign up in order to get your name out there and help spread the word.

Along the same lines, if you have patience and basic knowledge of high school math, science or literature, you could easily work as a tutor for students in your community. If so, that can be a great way to make money from home. And remember, you can always get the textbook and brush up a little before you do your tutoring!

4. Use the assets you have
This last possibility will seem like the easiest or the hardest way to make money from home, depending on your particular circumstances. Do you have things laying around your house that you no longer need? If so, then you can make extra money by selling them on eBay!

And these days, it has become much easier to make money by renting out a spare room in your house -- or even renting out your car. If you want to rent a room, AirBnB is probably the first place you'll want to start. And Getaround is a great site for renting your car, although it's only available in certain cities right now. Of course, there is always some risk with letting a stranger stay in your house (or use your car) but if you are looking to build your income from home, this is one of the quickest ways.

No matter what you decide to try, give it some time and ask for advice from people who have some experience with it. And if you want more insights, check out our Career Tips resource center. Good luck!

More from Credit.com

• Is a Debt Management Plan Right for You?
• 7 Tips for Breaking Bad Financial Habits

Brian Snyder / Reuters

A view shows the silhouette of a student with a graduation cap as students take their seats for the diploma ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in this May 24, 2012, file picture.

Want a solid, middle-class salary straight out of college? Skip the last two years.

A site that analyzes state-level data of how much people earn a year after graduating college found some counterintuitive results: Certain students who earn associate’s degrees can get higher salaries than graduates of four-year programs — sometimes thousands of dollars more. 

“These numbers and the consistency of these numbers are surprising to me,” said Mark Schneider, president of CollegeMeasures.org and a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. CollegeMeasures aggregates anonymized education and earnings data to figure out who earns what after graduation. 

Some of its results run counter to commonly-held assumptions. Community college degrees, long considered also-ran prizes in the race for academic achievement, “are worth a lot more than I expected and that I think other people expected,” Schneider said.

But there is a catch: You have to earn your degree in a technical or occupational program to earn anywhere near $40,000. That’s the approximate average earned by students who went to school and worked in the state of Virginia and graduated with two-year degrees in these fields between 2006 and 2010. Graduates of two-year nursing programs earned am average of $45,342.

Once they entered the work force, holders of what CollegeMeasures characterizes as “occupational/technical” associate’s degrees made about $6,000 a year more than people who earned associate’s degrees in non-occupational programs. Given the high demand for nurses, computer specialists, mechanical technicians and the like, that’s not unexpected. In a study published earlier this year by the Census Bureau, college graduates with science and engineering degrees were about 10 percentage points more likely to be employed full-time than the average of all graduates.

The surprising finding is a comparison of those earnings to what bachelor’s degree graduates made, on average: $36,067.

People with liberal arts and humanities majors didn’t even fare that well: on average, grads with political science majors earned $31,184, history majors earned $30,230 and English majors only earned $29,222 a year.

"In general, majors that are linked to occupations have better employment prospects than majors focused on general skills," a report published earlier this year by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, said. 

Schneider said this pattern of workers with two-year technical degrees outearning many four-year grads has been consistent across the states it has studied so far. (Data on Arkansas, Virginia and Tennessee has been published; the group plans to release statistics for Colorado graduates soon.)

“In the U.S., we’ve tended to think that the bachelor’s degree is the only thing that matters, and this data tells us that technical degrees from community colleges are hidden gems,” he said.

A generation ago, things were different. Before the recession of 1980-1981, a bachelor’s degree of any kind was a ticket to a career that offered middle-class earnings, said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce.

This isn’t the case anymore, he said. “It’s a system in which you can’t just have an ambition to go to college and get a degree. You have to pay attention to the courses and the content of your degree.”

The big caveat with the impressive amounts some two-year grads can earn is that they don’t reflect lifetime earnings. In general, people with more advanced degrees still earn more over the course of their careers, Carnevale said, but there’s a growing divergence between humanities and technical-field majors when it comes to future earnings performance. 

“The degree level matters, but a lot less than it used to,” he said “What matters is what you take. Thinking about it as a hierarchy of degrees isn’t the way to think about it anymore.”

Last week, Iowa’s all-male high court upheld the legality of terminating a female employee because her boss found her too attractive.

Iowa dentist James Knight fired his assistant, Melissa Nelson, after a decade-long tenure because he found her “irresistible” and said he would be likely to have an affair with her if he kept her on the payroll, according to the court’s opinion.

In 2009, Knight’s wife Jeanne demanded that her husband fire his 32-year-old assistant Melissa Nelson after she found out the two sometimes exchanged text messages, according to court documents.

For his part, Knight said he found Nelson’s clothes “distracting,” saying, “I don’t think it’s good for me to see her wearing things that accentuate her body.” Nelson denied wearing inappropriate attire and said she put on a coat when Knight complained about what she was wearing, say the court documents.

The couple’s pastor supported the decision to terminate Nelson although Knight said she was “the best dental assistant he ever had," the court's opinion said.

Nelson sued on the grounds that she was fired because of her gender, while Knight’s lawyers argued that the termination was because of the relationship between the two. The court sided with Knight’s argument, noting that legal precedent found it acceptable for a boss to fire a worker due to a spouse’s jealousy. The court also said Knight didn’t discriminate against women as a class. He had other female employees, and replaced Nelson with another woman. 

“It opens up a really disturbing door,” said Brad Seligman, an attorney who represented plaintiffs in a Wal-Mart gender discrimination class-action suit alleging company-wide discrimination against female workers regarding pay and promotions.

Seligman said that argument wouldn’t fly if the case was in the federal court system. “Here it’s quite clear that the woman was being perceived as a threat because she was a woman,” he said. The termination was “a decision that’s totally based on gender.”

Since Nelson's case was tried in and argued based on case law from the state court system, she has little legal recourse at this point, Seligman said. "It's probably the end of the line for this plaintiff."

Knight erred by not having policies in writing addressing employee dress code and behavior, said Amy N. Letke, founder and CEO of Integrity HR. “It’s really important, when you’re the business owner, to set the tone with what’s OK.” 

“People who work hard to be attractive and high performers are typically rewarded,” said Letke. “She was punished.”