Within these six major categories of career-oriented home study programs, you find both a wide range of specializations and, in some instances, potential overlaps between two or more broad fields. For example, you can classify a furniture and cabinet maker as either a tradesman or an artisan, depending on the work the cabinet maker engages in and your perspective on furniture making. Or, you can classify an e-commerce professional under either business or computers.
You will likely find the broadest range of different specializations within the categories of careers you can classify as either trades or arts. Some example career-oriented home-study programs in the trades category include locksmith, plumber, gunsmith and auto repair technician. Career-oriented home-study programs that fall into the arts category include Web design, cartoonist certification, dressmaking and design, and desktop publishing and design. Career-oriented home-study programs that lead to a career in the trades category include study programs such as landscaper, interior decorator or jewelry designer. You can also regard the video-game design curriculum specialization as leading to a career you can in the broad categories of computer professional or artist.
You can find different types of institutions offering career-oriented home-study programs. A significant difference involves the distinction between programs known as online education programs and those known as distance education programs. Online education programs may or may not have entrance prerequisite requirements and the institutions that offer these programs usually deal only with online education. Distance education programs, in contrast, will have prerequisite requirements comparable to a similar curriculum offered in a physical, or brick-and-mortar, setting. Distance education programs often have an affiliation with a physical public or private academic institution and may offer the same or a similar career-oriented curriculum at one or more of the physical campus locations, such as a community college or a four-year college or university.
With such a diverse range of possible careers, the potential salaries vary enormously. The Bureau of Labor Statistics gives an average mean across all careers within the United States as an hourly rate ranging between $16.27 and $21.35 per hour as of May 2010. The BLS also provides the figure of the average growth rate across all professions as a range of from 7 percent to 13 percent as of late 2009.