Sorry for the mis-assumption about her motivation. If she has a lot of self-motivation, perhaps she could look into something where she’s more self-employed. Depending on where she lives, it’s possible to make a fair amount of money doing things like dog-sitting, baby-sitting, home assistant, etc. just within her neighborhood. Studying things like business, communications, and marketing would be the most flexible skills for being self-employed.
There are lots of jobs which don’t have any sort of traditional office component. For example, if she likes meeting people, she could do sales, be a personal trainer at a gym, be an estimator for a home improvement company, and so on. There are many jobs where you’re only in the office for a small amount of time. She may be able to find a traditional job in an area she enjoys and it won’t mean sitting in an office all day.
She might want to spend some time trying to figure out what kind of career she’d find interesting first. Just focusing on the workplace environment may be putting the cart before the horse. The career counseling dept at her school would likely be able to offer her a lot of help with figuring that out.
Agreed, she’s got to define her own priorities before any meaningful plans can be made. Being a full time tele-commuter right out of the graduation gate almost certainly isn’t viable but it’s not inconceivable that it could be a 10 year career goal.
I want to throw Instructional Design into the ring for possible fields to go into. It would combine some of her affinity for the education field with technology, but there’s a ton of room for creativity. All of the IDs I’ve worked with had complete flexibility in work location. As long as you have the right tools, you can work from anywhere.
I think it’s true that certain industries are more amenable to working from home than others, but I also think company culture has a lot to do with it. I work at a large, multinational company where on any given day, probably at least half of the people are WFH. I haven’t seen some people who live 20 minutes away in months since they simply don’t come in, and a lot of people are fully remote and have never been into an office at all (including recent college grads).
In our case, it has nothing to do with people’s roles (which run the gamut) and everything to do with the general company culture and size—one, we assume you’re competent and will do your work unsupervised, and two, we’re spread out all over, so in practice it doesn’t make a huge difference if you’re taking a meeting from home or Hawaii or Antarctica. Things are so cross-functional and there are so many people in the company that chances are you’re not having a meeting with someone in the same office anyway. Hell, out of my entire team (8 people including me), only my manager and I are in the NYC area, and he comes in maybe twice a week at most.
I know there are rankings of best companies to work for as a remote employee and such. My company isn’t alone in the “everyone WFH as much as you like” mentality. Might be worth checking out those.