For years, Charlotte Lingard-Young worked as a mental health counselor and loved her job, but as the spouse of an Air Force officer, she frequently found her career progress disrupted whenever her husband was reassigned to a new duty station. "Each time we moved, it meant that I would have to find a new job and start all over again," she recalls.

When her husband was transferred to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., in early 2004, however, Lingard-Young was determined to do things differently. In her search for more career stability and hoping to spend more time with her two young children, she enrolled in a three-day training class offered on base. Known as the "Portable Career and Virtual Assistant Training Program," the coursework promised to educate military spouses on skills and practical considerations to create, market, and run their own virtual enterprises.

"I had no idea what type of business I could run from home," Lingard-Young recalls. "So I just sat in class and listened to everything that was said and planned from there."

She quickly decided to focus on offering transcription services, Internet research, and data entry. Within two weeks, Lingard-Young had her first client. She soon added more clients and has worked steadily ever since. Today, she has five companies that are regular customers and several others that use her support on an as-needed basis.

"It has worked out tremendously," Lingard-Young says, noting that although her husband has not been permanently transferred since she began her new career, she is able to successfully "redeploy" her own business whenever she travels to the East Coast for extended visits with family. "I wish I had known this was possible, because I would have done it a long time ago."

The training program, run by Staffcentrix, a Conn.-based training and development firm focused on virtual careers, has been offered to military spouses and State Department foreign-service spouses (under a separate program known as the e-Entrepreneur Training Program) for nearly eight years. The program is available at scheduled times on most military bases and is taught by a Staffcentrix trainer or an on-base professional who has participated in the company’s "Train the Trainer" program.

More than 4,500 military and foreign-service spouses successfully have completed the Virtual Assistant coursework, and 69 percent of those participants continue to run their business at least three years following the training. (Three years is the average time between duty station transfers for most military members).

Christine Durst, co-founder of Staffcentrix and co-author of "The Two Second Commute, says that the success rate of Military Spouse Virtual Assistants (MSVAs) is "phenomenal" considering that the survival rate of general home-based businesses is just three percent, according to the Small Business Administration.

One reason for such success is that MSVA trainers try to work with military spouses who have underlying skills that translate well to virtual work.

The range of services these MSVAs offer to businesses run the gamut, Durst says, but some of the most popular include accounting and bookkeeping; foreign language translation; document or optical character recognition (OCR) scanning; database management; desktop publishing; graphics design; editing and proofreading; grant proposal and ghost writing; call center support; and medical transcription.

Lingard-Young admits that she has been surprised how quickly she was able to build her own virtual business, but thinks the MSVA training prepared her well for the demands and reality of being a home-based entrepreneur. "Anybody who wants to be a virtual assistant can go through this training and get started," she says. "But you have to be really persistent and not give up. If you do that, you will get that first client and eventually build the business."

For more information on the Portable Career and Virtual Assistant Training Program, please visit www.staffcentrix.com or www.msvas.com.