Not too long ago, the freedom to work from home was considered a highly desirable perk for a privileged few. Today it’s become a global necessity.
The coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of people to suddenly figure out how to do their jobs from home. And it’s left millions of others unexpectedly jobless and scrambling to find new work they can do from home in 2023. Check out our ranks for the top towns for remote workers in the UK here.
Office life will return but there will be a blended work/life balance for many.
Working from home saves time and money. The average remote worker saves $4,000 a year on gas, car maintenance, insurance and public transport. Not to mention enjoying a bit more sleep in the morning and family time in the evening. As companies settle into a new rhythm, productivity and Zoom fatigue will improve. The Economist says that there could be over 1 billion remote workers by 2035 - 86% of them working from home.
The advantages of remote jobs are many:
- You can often set your own hours, and at many work-from-home jobs you can work as little or as much as you want.
- You can work from home to supplement your income at another job, or you can make remote work your full-time job.
- You can save money on commuting costs, on clothes for the office and on child care.
- You can be home with your family while still earning an income.
- You can kiss your commute goodbye, turning your former drive time into work time while reducing your carbon footprint (not to mention reducing the stress from sitting in hour-long traffic jams or on crowded buses).
According to Andrew Chamberlain, the chief economist at Glassdoor, here are some of the top workplace trends that can be anticipated for 2022:
- Though millions of Americans worked from home in 2020, most will return to in-person workplaces at least part-time in 2022.
- Remote workforces offer financial and recruiting benefits but suffer from reduced spontaneity, innovation and employee bonding. Remote teams are most effective if supplemented in part by in-person office workers.
- In 2022 and beyond, we should experience unprecedented innovation in hybrid roles combining remote and in-office work.
Working from home was on the rise in a major way long before the current crisis. A recent study by Global Workplace Analytics, a leading source for statistics on how many people work remotely, found that:
- Not including the self-employed, remote work has grown by a whopping 173% since 2005, according to 2018 U.S. Census data.
- 43% of employees work remotely “with some frequency,” according to 2016 Gallup data.
- 56% of employees have a job where at least some of their work could be done remotely.
- 80% of employees would prefer to work at home at least some of the time.
Working from home is also great for the environment. Research has shown that for every 3.9 million employees working from home for at least half of their week, that is the equivalent of taking 600,000 cars off the road for the entire year. With petrol prices at record highs for the foreseeable future, that makes financial sense. With other environmental impacts such as using less paper, it is the equivalent of planting 91 million trees.
Work-from-home jobs: Remote jobs are here to stay
Global Workplace Analytics has also developed a forecast on how the Covid-19 crisis will affect remote workers in the future. According the president of this company:
“Our best estimate is that we will see 25-30% of the workforce working at home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of 2022,” said Kate Lister, the author of “Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Working From Home.”
So how do you get your piece of the pie, one you can eat at home in your pajamas and slippers? For this analysis, we looked at dozens of jobs that can be done at home, but we focused on jobs that don’t require rocket-science-level skills. Some lists of this kind focus on the highest-paying remote jobs (like “supervisory attorney” or “medical director”), but if you’re qualified to do those jobs, you probably don’t need our help. The following, in no particular order, are the top picks from resume.io for 10 work-from-home jobs that ordinary people without exotic skills can do from home.
1. Writer/Editor
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” said Ernest Hemingway, noting that the writer “does his work alone.” So who needs an office? Writers do need editors, but editors can also do their best work at home.
The online revolution has had an adverse impact on print media, leading to mass layoffs of reporters and editors. Yet there are over 1 billion websites on the internet today that didn’t exist 30 years ago — and all of them contain text that was written by someone. Many websites thrive on a business model that relies almost entirely on the textual content, whether it’s news, features, advice, humor or “clickbait.” And many businesses use blogs to drive traffic to their websites. None of this content writes itself!
2. Data entry/transcriptionist
If you’re a fast typist, data entry is remote work that doesn’t require any advanced skills. Data entry simply means taking text and/or numbers from source documents and inputting them into a computer system. You won’t make a fortune doing it, but all it requires is a computer, telecommuting and an internet connection.
Transcription involves listening to audio or video and putting spoken words into writing. Transcription often requires time-stamping, or recording the precise second something is said. Transcription is needed for captioning videos — a booming field — and transcribing audios or videos also makes the content easily searchable. Another big part of this field is medical transcription, in which voice recordings from doctors are transcribed into written reports.
The more advanced form of this remote job is as a Data Analyst, which provides significantly more pay but is still a profession where you can work from home. If you have the relevant technical skills (or are aiming to get them), you can use data entry as a stepping stone to a more prestigious position.
What is the impact of broadening the talent pool? With the normalization of remote working, the available talent pool has suddenly got so much bigger. Candidates have more choice and should theoretically be happier in their roles in the longer term. This may lead to better retention of talent and more cohesive teams.
3. Translator
If you speak a second language well enough to translate it into English, or vice versa, then you possess an in-demand skill for a job that’s usually done remotely.
Translators are often essential when a company wants to sell its products in another country. Or at times critical information, like technical documentation, is written in a language that the people who need it don’t speak. And translating a website into, say, Spanish can increase the potential audience by 500 million people.
4. Social media manager
There are few businesses that wouldn’t benefit from a robust social media presence. Whether it’s a small restaurant that wants to promote its Taco Tuesday or a global sales giant like Walmart, social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are increasingly the go-to platforms to get the word out. The audience is immense, and the publicity is free.
Social Media Managers are experts at managing the digital footprint of the enterprises that employ them. They develop targeted campaigns, coordinate marketing strategies with sales departments, and regularly post new content. If you’re an avid user of social media, this job may be a way to make money doing what you like to do.
There are multiple health benefits of working from home:
- Helps people take care of their wellbeing (80%)
- Decreases everyday sources of stress (83%)
- Increases the amount and quality of exercise (67%)
According to Indeed, 50% of workers say that working from home has reduced their sick days.
Although.... 20% of remote employees find it difficult to cope with loneliness. That is an issue.
5. Graphic artist
If you’re a master at designing logos, creating striking illustrations or making sense of numbers with charts, you have a highly marketable skill that you can do in the privacy of your home.
Think of any successful company, and you can probably picture its logo — an essential element of any firm’s branding. Go to its website and notice how many graphic elements there are to break up the text. Even something as simple as illustrated icons to replace bullet points can enliven a website. Visual elements are essential because they catch the eye and draw people in, and these visuals depend on graphic artists.
6. SEO specialist
Search engine optimization (SEO) is something that every company or e-commerce business needs. There are millions of websites that were created without much thought for SEO, but today everyone understands its importance. Many of these websites need to revise their current content, page by page, and all of them need to implement good SEO practices going forward.
Learn how to do SEO, and you’ll have a marketable skill that is in little danger of becoming obsolete. You may think of this skill as solely connected with Google, but in reality, search engines are a type of technology regardless of digital monopolies (in fact, there are lots of regional search engines that are very relevant in national or niche markets).
7. English teacher
You may lack the expertise to tutor calculus students in quadratic equations, but do you speak English? There’s a market for that as either a private or formal teacher. In many countries, proficiency in English is a major key to upward mobility, and the lack thereof is a big disadvantage in the global economy.
Watch TV for a few hours in Latin America and you’ll see multiple ads for companies offering online English classes. Who wants to sign up for a community college class in Santiago when you can have live, personal instruction by two-way video with a teacher from San Francisco?
8. Call center/customer service representative
Most consumer-oriented companies need someone who can do customer support like answer the phone — and some of them get a lot of calls. So we have the classic call center, jam-packed with cubicles, ringing telephones and chattering customer service reps.
At some point it occurred to some call center that all of its telephone answerers have their own phones at home (not to mention the rising prevalence of online communication through VoIP technology and CRM systems). Why not route those calls to people working remotely, eliminating the overhead of the office space? If you have an abundance of patience and don’t mind spending a lot of time on the phone, there are lots of opportunities in this field.
Don't worry if you have not worked from home before. With so much change in the workplace, many people will be embarking on a remote career for the first time. You may not have formally worked from home, but you will doubtless have had experience doing the job when you have not been in the office. Talk about working from home during parental leave, sick leave or maybe remote education. You already know what it entails.
9. Salesperson (Sales Manager)
A sales office is often a place where people sit around not selling anything. The real action is on the streets and in face-to-face meetings, though the telephone remains the best way to set up the meetings that close sales.
So if a sales manager depends on the telephone and meetings with clients, what good is the sales office? Many companies are realizing that good salespeople can do their jobs just as well working from home as working in an office. If you’re the kind of person who can “sell hay to a farmer,” the farmer doesn’t really need to meet with you at your sales office.
10. Virtual assistant
Virtual assistants provide remote administrative support to executives of small businesses, large enterprises, and sometimes entire top companies — booking travel, scheduling meetings, organizing personal calendars, responding to calls and emails, and potentially much more. Think of the super-efficient, hyper-organized administrative or executive assistant who once sat outside the boss’s office, and the boss introduces her to others by saying, “She basically runs the place.” The main difference here is this person no longer sits in the office.
Some virtual assistants manage social media accounts and other marketing activities. They may manage finances and budgets, keep track of expenses, assist with customer service and perform market research.
According to a Glassdoor report on projected job trends for 2022, administrative office jobs have taken a heavy hit in the past year, with open jobs for executive assistants falling by 55% between October 2019 and October 2020. However, this decline should only drive demand for virtual assistants working remotely.
The days when all of these things had to be done in the office are over - remote jobs are the future
If you didn’t find the job here that’s right for you, bear in mind that there are thousands of different types of jobs that can be done remotely. You know you, and your skills and interests are unique. Try searching for remote job listings in your specialized field, and the chances are you’ll be surprised at how many job opportunities options are out there in 2022. Not every job can be done remotely. But the number of work-at-home jobs is higher than ever, and all signs for the future point toward a reduced reliance on traditional workplaces. Resume.io has a wealth of advice on how to acquire great work-from-home jobs via our resume writing guides, HR-tested templates and our awesome online builder tool.
Do remote workers make less than on-site workers? In a comparison of the median income of telecommuters and in-office workers, PayScale found that remote workers earned more, but the company cautioned that these workers did not earn more because they were remote, but that only trusted and senior workers were permitted to work remotely.
How to write a resume for remote work
So how do you write a resume for remote work and why is it different from an on-site resume? Just as you would customize your resume to fit each job, you need to customize it to fit different job circumstances.
First, clearly state in your profile or cover letter that you want to work from home. Hiring managers don’t have time to waste, so if you have an interview for a job that requires you to go to the office and announce that you want to work from home, you are most probably going to lose the opportunity. No one likes a bait-and-switch.
Remote work requires some different skills from on-site work. Throughout your resume, emphasize these abilities to demonstrate to hiring managers that you have the skills it takes to get the job done while your dog barks in the background and your 5-year-old begs for ice cream for lunch.
Top skills for remote work:
- Excellent communication. Just because you can’t see your coworkers doesn’t mean they don’t need to know how your project is progressing or what you might need from them.
- Impeccable organization. You need a space at home that functions as a dedicated office where you can attend video meetings and have all your work material at your fingertips.
- Focus. Can you pretend you’re not at home or will you be interrupting your workflow to bake bread or fold the laundry? Remember that you have to be available just as you would in the office.
Infuse your employment history with examples of these skills so hiring managers will feel confident that you can be independent and get the job done.
Below is an employment history resume example sentence for a remote job.
"Independently conceived and developed employee manual for department of 100 work-from-home customer service representatives."
Without saying, “I can work without supervision,” this description tells hiring managers that you not only know how to complete tasks on your own, but you understand what it takes to successfully work remotely.
Keep in mind that many of the remote jobs on our list require excellent writing or editing skills. You can’t afford to make a typo or use poor grammar in your resume! Make sure you have a trusted colleague or friend proofread your work before you hit the send button.
A great resume is a key factor in successful remote job hunts, so go create yours in a few easy clicks!
