Rhiannon Osborne Tonner is a fourth year Natural Sciences student at UCL. She spent one month in Bali on Start Me Up’s UX Remote Internship Program.
I used to think remote working was for two kinds of people: coders and influencers. The rest of us, I assumed, had no options to pick from when it came to working remotely.
Then I went on the Start Me Up program (a program which offers recent graduates remote work experience) which opened my eyes to the multicoloured world of remote working.
Remote working is so much more than coding and Instagram. While working out of co-working spaces in Bali, I’ve met people who are working in areas I didn’t think it’d be possible to work remotely.
I have come into contact with people on journeys I could never have imagined.
Beyond the web developers and social media managers (so far, so obvious). I’ve met a host of people doing other occupations remotely. The main thing that seems to limit wider adoption of remote work across other sectors and industries is inertia and legacy systems, rather than genuine need.
Translators
This is a fairly obvious one. Many freelance translation jobs are advertised as ‘work from home’ jobs, which we know translates as remote jobs. Upwork, the jobs website that advertises freelance roles, has hundreds of translation jobs posted every day.
Designers
One of the best ways to work remotely is to develop an in-demand skillset. UX design tops the list as the most lucrative field in design today, with an average yearly salary of $96,505, according to Indeed. Moreover, big UX employers like TopTal, a platform for hiring top distributed talent, are completely distributed. I’ve also met freelance interior designers and university design lecturers who work remotely.
Data Analysts
Data analysts are in-demand. So it’s little surprise that they are also able to command more flexibility when it comes to setting their working benefits. The sheer growth in the number of jobs relating to analysing marketing data has opened up a huge number of options for people who want to work remotely.
Doctors
I’ve heard of doctors who’ve managed to wangle remote jobs affiliated to their surgeries back in their native countries. Holding Skype-style consultations with people in remote areas who have little access to healthcare, they’ve been able to diagnose conditions and prescribe medications to people who live in rural areas – far from treatment centers. There is also a movement towards Skype-led consultations as a primary form of contact before physical consultations in places such as the UK in order to alleviate the current pressure on the healthcare system, providing a conducive environment for remote work.
Professional Poker Players
Being a ‘remote’ poker player has lots of advantages. You save money and time you’d otherwise spend getting to your local casino and you can play away from prying eyes. You can also pull any face while you play (no poker face required). This may explain why I’ve met more than my fair share of poker players traveling the world since I discovered the world of remote work.
Copywriters
Writers have long had the freedom to work on the move. George Orwell lived in Paris on limited means. Foreign correspondents would send direct reports coded telegraphese (telegrams). Travel writers had one of the first ever ‘nomad’ jobs. Now ubiquitous copywriters and bloggers enjoy similar freedoms without much of the hassle.
Lawyers
Lawyers are often perceived as the epitome of a stuffy professional, suit and tie, briefcase in hand as they head to an expensive looking office and then reside there for hours on end. The concept of a lawyer remote working seems far fetched however the profession is evolving, albeit slowly. Cloud technology is allowing document management, financial data and billing to be stored and accessed from anywhere at anytime, contracts no longer have to be signed in blue ink with today’s technology. Remote working can also allow lawyers to surprisingly be more accessible. No longer confined to an office, and office hours, lawyers can hold Skype calls with clients at times when they would have previously been stuck in the office; their lives are more flexible.
Consultants
When you think of remote work, you don’t automatically think consulting. However, that said there are consultants out there working remotely.
A predominant part of consulting is teamwork and collaboration therefore one of the biggest challenges remote consultants face is team development.
An adjustment from traditional on-site consulting, those consultants doing it don’t deny that sometimes it is challenging. However with the number of collaboration tools on the rise it is becoming increasingly easy. Slack, Zoom, Trello, AirTable, Asana, Proofhub, Teamweek are all collaboration tools commonly used in the world of remote work, and they are just to name a few.
The right attitude, the right team and the help of technology remote consulting is increasingly possible.
This world of location independent work is out there for everyone to exploit. You just need to learn how. Something Start Me Up programs can help you with. Educating you in the world of remote work and developing in demand skills the programs give you an insight into what your future career could hold beyond four grey walls of an office building.
I used to think that remote working was only for certain types of people and certain career paths, however I stand corrected. All you need is the desire to make it work and you will.
If you’re skeptical about remote working, know you aren’t alone. If you’re curious as to how it works and how you can join the portion of the workforce which is location independent. Then embark on your remote working journey with Start Me Up Careers guiding the way.