Are you tired of commuting to the office every day? According to the Flexjobs annual survey, 65% of workers in the United States want to work remotely full-time post-pandemic, and 31% of workers would prefer a hybrid work arrangement, to combine in-office and remote work. In this new post-pandemic world, the opportunities to work remotely are endless.
Some types of jobs have always been remote. Others, which were never traditionally remote, are now transitioning to the new business structure. What all of these new opportunities have in common: You can make a full-time salary, by working from home. Here, learn about some of the best new career opportunities that you can pursue while sitting on your couch.
1. Great Communicator? Work as a Call Center Rep or Outbound Sales Rep
Customer Service & Call Center Agent: Many companies have remote customer service employees, whether they are in-house employees or are outsourced. In-house customer service representatives are employees who are employed directly by the company. When a company outsources their customer service department, this means they hire separate call centers to provide the customer service for them.
So, there are plenty of ways to be hired as a work-from-home customer service representative. As a remote customer service representative, you can earn as much as $16.23 per hour, which is the median rate for the position in the United States. Also, the only qualification necessary is oftentimes to have a high school diploma.
As a customer service representative at a call center or for a specific company, you will handle customer inquiries and questions, and help resolve issues. As you work from home, you may:
- Talk to customers on the phone,
- Help customers via chat software, or
- Respond to customer social media messages.
Inbound and Outbound Sales: If you are a great people-person, and communication is one of your strongest attributes, you may be the perfect candidate for an inbound or outbound sales position .
The best part is, you can succeed in an outbound or inbound sales job from home. All you usually just need is a high school diploma, and you can start working your way towards a typical salary of $50,000 a year.
While working an inbound sales job, you will respond to leads, which is when a potential customer reaches out to your company or the company you are assigned to, to inquire about a service or product.
So, in this position, it’s your job to make sure the customer learns everything they want to know, and with your help they will hopefully make a purchase.
As an outbound sales representative, it’s up to you to reach out and find new leads, or potential customers. By seeking out potential customers, you can activate your best sales-person skills and hopefully sell your employer’s service or product.
2. Tutor or Translator Jobs: Work to Help Clients Remotely
Tutor: One of the best parts of all the new technology that allows working from home to be so easy, is that it has made learning from home to do easy too. Now, you don’t need to stand at the front of a classroom to be a teacher or a tutor. Whether you want to work some extra hours helping children study for a tricky subject, or you dream of teaching English to adults in foreign countries as a full-time occupation, you can do it all from your home office.
And the best part is: you can make an average salary of $39,000 a year doing it. All you need to tutor from home is good internet connection and webcam. Nowadays, with softwares like Skype, FaceTime, Slack, Google Hangouts and more, you can host face-to-face classes whenever it suits your schedule.
Translator: As the world continues to globalize and digitize, getting in touch with other countries and cultures is easier than ever.
So in the totally interconnected world of today, there’s a huge market for translators.
Today, the median yearly salary for remote, work-from-home translators is $49,930.
To be a translator, all you have to do is be fluent in two languages. You can be a freelance translator, or work for a specific company.
Either way, all you’ll need is a computer, so you can translate written or audio materials from one language to the other. And if you know more than two languages, expect your salary to climb.
3. Earn $$$ With Work-From-Home Grant Writer or Medical Transcriptionist Jobs
Grant Writer: Grants are extremely important to many companies. Oftentimes, for organizations like nonprofits and charities, grants are the primary way for the organization to earn money and stay afloat. Asking for donation money is never easy, so that’s why these organizations will hire a grant writer to use their expertise and skills to do it for them.
To be a grant writer, you usually must have a high-level of writing skills and be familiar with the world of donations, charities, and fundraising. You can be employed by a company or organization who needs your skills full-time, or you can be a freelancer. However, having these skills can pay off — you can earn an average of $48,541 a year, just by grant writing from home.
Medical Transcriptionist: You may have thought that, in order to be a medical transcriptionist, you would need to work in a hospital or doctors office.
But, that’s not the case. You can still be a top-notch medical transcriptionist, but you can earn an average of $16.72 per hour working as one from the comfort of your couch.
Oftentimes, hospitals do not hire people to transcribe what is said in the hospitals directly. Instead, they hire companies who provide the medical transcriptionists remotely.
This is how it works: Hospitals will send the digital audio file recordings that need to be transcribed to the transcriptionist, or the agency that will pass on the assignment. The transcriptionist will type out what is said in the audio files.
All you need is a transcriptionist certificate from a vocational school or a degree from a community college to get started.
4. Being a Virtual Assistant or Bookkeeper Has Never Been So Easy
Virtual Assistant: Gone are the days where being an assistant meant doing the morning coffee run. Now you can be a personal assistant and never have to leave your house. All you need is a phone, a computer, and good internet.
As a virtual assistant, you can still be a personal assistant to a big-time CEO. But, you can do it virtually. All you need is a high-school diploma, and you can earn an average of $15.72 an hour.
You’ll still do basic tasks that your employer may need done on a time crunch, like:
- Data entry,
- Answering emails,
- Making calls,
- Scheduling appointments,
- Writing reports, or
- Doing research.
But, you won’t have to commute home at the end of the day.
Bookkeeper: With technological innovations and new softwares like Quickbooks, FreshBooks, and Xero, it’s easier than ever to manage a small business’s finances and keep their books up to date from the comfort of your home.
To be a bookkeeper, employers oftentimes will expect your educational background to be higher than a high-school diploma.
But, you can learn everything you need to know about financial management and how to be a bookkeeper at a community college.
As long as you know a thing or two about how to navigate Excel spreadsheets and do simple math, you’re in a good place to start.
And don’t worry, your college courses will be well worth it. You can earn an average salary of $40,240 a year just by helping companies keep track of their finances.
5. Emerging Industries: Work as a Social Media Manager or Graphic Designer From Home
Social Media Manager: Social Media jobs are not only for millennials. As social media platforms are becoming more and more a part of everyday life, learning how to manage a company’s accounts can make for one of the best remote, work-from-home jobs. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, all types of companies are hiring digital and media-savvy in-house employees and freelancers to market and connect to customers.
These platforms are becoming increasingly important marketing real estate, and current customers or potential clients increasingly want to connect to a company and their customer services through their social media profiles, comments and DMs (i.e., direct messaging). It can be your job to communicate with customers and keep your company’s profile and posts up to date. You can be a successful media manager from home, and earn a median salary of $50,661 doing it.
Graphic Designer: Managing social media isn’t the only way to work closely with companies and help build brands from home. You can also be a remote graphic designer.
All you need is a computer, knowledge of graphic-design softwares, and a lot of creativity.
Whether you want a full-time job with one large company, or you want to freelance and have multiple clients and manage your own schedule, remote graphic design gigs are on the rise.
Depending on whether you choose to work full-time or part-time, whether you work for one company or freelance for many, remote graphic design work can consist of a wide range of responsibilities, from photo editing and UX/UI web design, to logo creation and product mockups.
There are countless graphic design paths to go down, and a number of niches to focus on. Whichever way you choose, you can earn a median salary of $50,370 annually for working creatively on your home computer.