Remote Work
Remote work can appeal to many for a variety of reasons - wanting to travel and work consistently at the same time, solving the childcare conundrum by working from home, etc - but the common factor is the opportunity for flexibility. By being able to work from anywhere within reason, individuals can control their environment to a large degree that can exponentially increase their quality of life. Before I started working a remote 9-5 job, though, it seemed like a stable, full-time remote position was something of a unicorn. So - how does one get there? It took some persistence, creativity, and determination, but below are some of the lessons that helped me along the way.
Hone Your Search
While, in these crazy times, remote work is arguably more common that it ever has been, sifting through new openings that are specifically designated as remote positions can still be quite the task. Below are some of the more reliable job boards I’ve found in the course of hunting for remote jobs:
We Work Remotely: by far my favorite board, it is dedicated to only remote positions, and includes everything from jobs that don’t require degrees (finally!) to positions requiring a great deal of experience in different areas.
LinkedIn: tried and true; I would recommend that anyone looking for remote work start building their online presence by having a profile on LinkedIn. If you’re able to gather some references on this site, it will help you down the line by being able to provide them indefinitely. Building an email alert for any remote jobs in your field of interest will cut down on the time you spend searching for them as well.
Stack Overflow: this tech-based job board is geared very much to programmers and developers, and has a lot of great opportunities. They even have a filter to sort by all their remote jobs (because they know what’s up!).
Accounting Principals: this is part of a larger, umbrella-based staffing agency, but in this section, you can browse for full or part time accounting jobs, or work with a recruiter to find potential positions that would be a good fit.
These are just a tiny handful of the job boards out there, but can be a good jumping-off point. I am a huge fan of setting email alerts for a bunch of different sites so I can see the opportunities as soon as they come in.
Be Willing to Pay Your (Remote) Dues
There are many industries in which you can work remotely, but my initial goal was a full-time “office” job where I would be managing an organization’s website from 9-5, or some semi-normal, eight-hour period and then be off the clock, without going in to a brick-and-mortar office. My motivation for this was that I wanted to travel around South and Central America, while having a steady income but not being tied to a specific location. During my search, I found the following to be effective approaches when applying to potential positions:
Cover letters are huge. Having a spectacular resume is always a boon, but cover letters give you a chance to give your potential employer an insight to your life, goals, and organizational fit. You can use them to build context for why you want to work remotely, and explain how that flexibility will benefit not just you, but them as well.
Honesty, immediately, is crucial. I put the fact that I was looking for a remote position in the opening of all my cover letters. If they kept reading after that, I knew I had a chance to negotiate. If not, being up front prevented any time from being wasted after that point, for both the potential employer and me.
Offering a trial period can change minds. In my cover letters, I would always offer potential employers a trial period during which I would be in the office, so my supervisor and any other colleagues would get in-person interaction to build a foundation of trust, knowledge, camaraderie, and security, for the time after which I wouldn’t be in the office.
The great thing about offering to work remotely for an employer is that you can come up with proposals that are custom-built for you, so think through it and come up with some options that you can provide.
Create Your Own
Part of the beauty of remote work is that the sky’s the limit - if you can dream it, you can likely find a way to make it a reality. While going totally solo would likely require you to build your own website, provide a way for customers to pay, and really market yourself to build a base (all of which are awesome adventures in themselves), one cool opportunity available is AirBnB Online Experiences. Since COVID, they have begun offering Online Experiences, which is… pretty much anything people have thought to offer and had approved. If you teach dance, speak another language, have a funny skill you can teach or can think up anything else that might be cool to share, there is an Experience Builder tool that will take you through all the steps to set pricing, duration, availability, and all the little details. Before all the quarantining, I did a non-online version of this to test it as a side gig, and was impressed at the smoothness of the platform. If nothing else, it’s pretty incredible to browse through and see what else is out there!
To conclude, there are a variety of ways to get into the world of remote working - if you have the vision, you can make it happen.
