Skills for remote work: Avoiding getting automated away
It’s the classic dilemma, when you want to change career, or start your very first one. How do you know what you’re good at, what you can do for others, and what competencies are needed?
In remote work it’s harder than ever, and we get a lot of people asking us about unskilled remote work, it’s the dream for many. But that means the competition is fierce for every job, even what people see as the unskilled ones.
The trouble is that those ‘unskilled’ jobs can mostly be done by AI now, there’s no need to pay people for simple jobs like data entry, or ‘typing’ documents when you can get AI to do it for free. Indeed, any mention of paying people for data entry, basic translations, is an immediate red flag for a scam anyway.
So, where does that leave us? If you’re really serious about finding work that you can do from anywhere, you need to educate yourselves, upskill, learn new things. And you need to learn things that cannot be done by a bot or an app, now or in the future.
Work that can easily be automated, even now:
⛔️ Data entry
⛔️ Appointment setting
⛔️ Customer service online chat
⛔️ Basic app development
⛔️ Content generation, e.g. product descriptions and social media posts
Offering basic skills like this leaves you unable to compete with an AI. So you need to double-down on the human aspects, and raise things to the next level
✅ Instead of data entry, learn data science and analysis
✅ Instead of appointment setting, offer diary management, travel planning, executive support services
✅ Develop higher level customer experience niche expertise, that the bot refers complex cases or really annoyed people to
✅ Basic apps and coding can be done by AI, but planning and deployment and specifying not so much, also specialist languages and programming tools remain in demand
✅ Go beyond content creation to content strategy, social media management and analytics, managing paid media, and developing content management plans
There are lots more skills that you could learn too, so get on those courses, many of them are free. You can look for skills courses on LinkedIn, Coursera, Udemy and others to find free or reasonably priced education, take as many as you can in your chosen field to show you are willing to learn, even if you don’t have much experience in that field.
Then, add these skills to your LinkedIn profile, and find a way to demonstrate them - if you can’t find a freelance gig then create something for yourself, to feature on your portfolio.
What can I do to improve my chances?
Educate yourself as much as you can, build a portfolio of your work to be able to show prospective employers and clients, start networking. If you’re not sure how, when and where to network, get our Business Networking Journal to help you get started, and look out for our next Level Up Your LinkedIn Challenge to really boost your engagement.
Make sure your LinkedIn profile is absolutely spot on, employers and clients will check it. Join some relevant groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and start engaging. Put your name forward for potential work when you see it, ask people to recommend you for work too.
Our remote work communities are great for networking too, get involved in Remote Work (your country) or even better join our exclusive Remote Work Connected community and get some more tailored help and advice.
Don’t just take one course and think that’s it, continue to educate yourself and learn lots of different skills, stay on top of what’s needed in the job market and impress prospective employers.
People can be hired, or contracted, from anywhere in the world now, that’s a huge pool of talent to choose from, and a lot of them will work for less than you will! Get used to the idea that you have to be the very best at what you do, or want to do, to beat that competition.
To succeed in the remote work world you need to keep learning and improving your skills, stay ahead of the game, and don’t assume that remote jobs will fall into your lap. You need to take remote work seriously, do your research, find out what skills you need, send in your applications. Going into Facebook groups and announcing ‘need job’ or ‘looking for remote work’ that isn’t going to cut it. Follow the instructions given by the hirer, to create an application which lands right in their sweet spot.
