How to Remain Competitive and Gain Success in the Remote Work Age
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Remote work can be a win-win situation for you and your future employer if you’re both clear on how it’s mutually beneficial.
The 2020 pandemic was an unconventional and rushed way to pilot this. If you missed the opportunity to reflect on how to make it work in your favor, you missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to set up your ideal lifestyle for work-life balance.
It’s not too late to try now. But it’s getting harder than it was in March 2020. If finding legitimate work-from-home jobs is still your goal, you need to know and do the things below quickly to secure that flexibility.
What You Need to Know About Remote Work
You need to be part of the top 10 percent of applicants pursuing openings in the right job categories to be most competitive for remote work.
Let’s say there are 100 job listings on LinkedIn now, and 50 people applying for each of those jobs. According to the recent data, only 20 of those job listings offer remote work (whether 100 percent or hybrid), but at least 25 people are applying for them.
Most of the industries allowing more than half of their team to work at home do so mostly for jobs requiring specialized skills like software design, statistical/mathematical analysis, or a law degree.
That means the five people with the least number of credentials, experience, or achievements will likely get overlooked. Not because you aren’t qualified, but because you are less qualified than others to demand any of the opportunities available.
There are a couple of reasons for this. A PwC study shows that though more employers than employees said working from home went well during the pandemic shutdown, employers still think their team’s productivity will increase by working in an official office space.
Most of the industries allowing more than half of their team to work at home do so mostly for jobs requiring specialized skills like software design, statistical/mathematical analysis, or a law degree.
Table: Percentage of workers with selected types of flexibility (2021)
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of course, this gets more complicated when you are a Black woman. The percentage of us in entry-level technology, financial services, or legal fields are 1.7, 7, and 3 percent respectively.*
Knowing exactly who you are, what you want, and what you bring to the table is essential to pursuing remote work.
So unless you’re willing to take a large pay cut with entry-level jobs, or have the means to start your own business, the remote work possibilities are not that plentiful. But now that you have a realistic outlook, you can put together a strategy that increases your odds of creating the work environment you want.
What You Need to Do to Work from Home
I don’t say this to sound corny or overly spiritual, but knowing exactly who you are, what you want, and what you bring to the table is essential to pursuing remote work.
I speak from personal experience. I started working from home two years before the pandemic but had no clarity around why and how this method worked best for me. So when the lockdown happened, I wasted time chasing after every lucrative opportunity. And I eventually quit each one as soon as I realized my heart wasn’t in it.
One time, I earned a scholarship to learn coding at one of the highest-ranked schools for data, finance, and IT. This should have been a guaranteed way for me to open the doors to multiple six-figure roles, and earn the freedom to work wherever and whenever I wanted.
But I struggled. No matter how many study groups I joined, or how late I stayed up working on assignments, I couldn’t stop feeling miserable about coding. Not even the threat of losing my scholarship was enough to keep me motivated.
Once you know yourself and your value, you need to build a portfolio of evidence proving you’d be a highly productive solution to anyone hiring you.
I needed time to map out my interests, strengths, and values before I could discover which jobs aligned with all three. I used this vision mapping tool to organize my thoughts and develop a strong argument for why I should be hired for the work I really wanted to do.
How to Create a Strong Portfolio
Once you know yourself and your value, you need to build a portfolio of evidence proving you’d be a highly productive solution to anyone hiring you. You need this whether you desire to be an independent contractor or to work as non-exempt staff with a company.
By “highly productive solution” I mean this: tell employers how quickly and accurately you can solve the problems important to them. Being vague about why you’re the best fit for a role is the surest way to disqualify yourself for competitive remote opportunities.
The specific items you need in your portfolio are:
Certificates like diplomas (from university and/or graduate studies) or credentials earned from verified institutions like Google, Hubspot, Microsoft, AWS, or the Project Management Institute. These certificates can cost a lot of money, so be prepared to either save up slowly to cover the costs or research scholarships that help you pay for your studies.
Work samples like academic essays, published articles, original code (posted by you on sites like GitHub), or original designs (i.e. graphics, videos edited, etc.) that potential clients/employers can review to see the results of past work you’ve completed. I like to upload all of these to a Google Drive folder with the link permissions set to “Anyone can view”. That way, I can simply hyperlink it in any email or resume I submit without worrying about whether someone can access it.
Letters of recommendation from your former managers and/or clients. This is probably the most important because this proves that someone in the past thought highly enough of you to (a) pay you for work and (b) suggest that others pay you, also. I’ve found that this gave me the most flexibility to negotiate salary and the number of hours I worked. For instance, I went from working 30 to 12 hours per week for the same amount of money after switching from one client to the next.
Covering the Costs of Your Remote Lifestyle
Finally, you need to consider how you’ll cover the costs of your well-being. Remote work is considered a fringe benefit to some employers, which means you may have to give up others like longer paid vacation, bonuses, or full coverage healthcare. If you go the independent contractor route, you have to pay for your own fringe benefits and work equipment (computer, cell phone, etc.)—which means you need to be in a position to demand a pay rate high enough to cover more than your basic necessities.
Ironically, this is where working from home puts your work-life balance at risk. And this is why that initial vision mapping and value assessment are critical. You want to be in a position where no one will question paying you exactly what you need so that you don’t experience the same level of stress working from home as you would in an office.
As my own boss, it’s incredibly important that I have strong budgeting skills to make sure I’m financially stable. That’s why I also created this money management tool to hold me accountable for things I need to do daily to live and work comfortably.
There are still so many other things to consider before making the leap from an external office to a home office, but this is the bare minimum to start. Let me know in the comments below any questions still unanswered or tips you would add based on your personal experiences.
* Check out the links below for more information on these trends:
Why It Took 233 Years to Get the First Black Female Supreme Court Nominee
The 10 jobs with the most remote work opportunities—and how much they pay