Planning to start working remotely? 

Planning to start working remotely?

Finally, you’re free from working in a traditional corporate 9-to-5 grind, and you’ll be doing a job which is a dream for many. Working from your favourite coffee shop, or vibrant cafe serving tempting and delicious food or working from your home sitting all day in your pyjamas. Woah! Sounds incredibly amazing, right?

There are abundant reasons to choose remote work over sitting all day in an office, that you probably don’t need any persuasion. Many of us have various preferences when it comes to working from designated workspaces.

However working remotely might sound as easy as pie, but it’s apparently not. As we know that the pie will taste bad loaded with bitterness if you don’t add the ingredients in the right proportion. Similar is with remote work. Every time you start something from the ground, it takes a lot of courage to overcome the challenges that you face at the initial steps.

Here I’ve listed down the solutions to the top five challenges that you may face at your exploration stage of remote work.

1. Lack of Expertise

Everyone today wants to accomplish more and more in less time. Due to which they avoid focusing on getting the complete knowledge of the particular subject. Little knowledge about the entire concept can actually be harmful to your future growth.

Before you start looking for remote jobs, you should first get to know the complete knowledge about the remote work environment and be prepared with questions – How will you manage work-life and time? How communication takes place within remote teams? How to deal with distractions coming your way? You’ll need to get into the complete insights of remote work culture.

1. Sustain in Remote Culture

You’ve planned to go remote and have got the complete knowledge about the remote work culture. What’s next? Do you think that the comprehensive knowledge about the concept will help you sustain in the remote culture?

Well, no. It’s not enough. You need to analyse and decide if you’ll be a cultural fit. This will be the most crucial decision of your remote career and many companies like Buffer have their cultural policies for their remote employees according to which, their employees work remotely. If you think you possess these qualities or can quickly adapt to them, then you are ready to go remote and enjoy a flexible work life.

1. Drafting a Remote Resume

How exactly can you land a remote position with a company or part-time remote work? One of the most critical things to do en-route to a remote job is to highlight skills on your resume that convey you as an ideal remote candidate to potential employers. This is where the remote job seekers or remote work aspirants lack behind and fail to draft a perfect resume for a remote job.

To make sure your resume or cover letter is remote-worthy, you need to add crucial skills on your resume like Digital Communication – since online communication is essential in a remote team. Therefore, you must add this skill on your resume to make it look ideal.

Apart from this, it would help if you mention the time management factor as managing your time effectively is another key component of remote work. Since remote work enables you flexibility, you should mold that flexibility into something productive.

1. Finding a Remote Job

Job seekers constantly browse through job boards to secure a job. Similarly, many remote job seekers search for remote jobs on the mainstream job portals and end up getting none. While the mainstream job boards like Indeed, Monster, etc. are great for finding a job, there are other remote job portals where you can lookout for a remote job with specific filters.

If you’re looking for a remote job then you can create your profile on remote job portals like FlexJobs, We Work Remotely, PowerToFly, Dribble, Remote.co, Just Remote, Virtual Vocations, Pangain, Remotive, etc.

1. Communication and Technology Hiccups during Remote Interview

Mostly remote job seekers think that the remote job interview will be conducted online, and they don’t prepare much for it. While you’re preparing for your remote job interview, you must focus on your communication skills as it is the key to collaborate with a remote team. You must ensure that you can convey to the employer that you have the skills to improve team collaboration and don’t hesitate to ask or repeat something again that the employer said for clarification. Do not make any assumptions as this might take the wrong turn.

Since it’s a remote job interview taking place over a video call, you must ensure that you have a non-spotty internet connection, high-quality webcam and microphone. In case you lag in tech setups, it will interrupt the whole flow of your interview.

Also, most meetings in a remote team happen over video calls, so, it is essential for the employer to know that you will be present in all those meetings.

Wrapping Up

Well, these were some of the primary challenges that every Remote Job Seeker faces at their exploration stage of working remotely. If you’re facing any of these, you can straight away lookout for the solutions that I’ve provided you and get hassle-free remote working experience.

Also, you can get comprehensive insights into remote work by joining The Remote Work Summit that covers the entire spectrum of discussion on Remote Work and become an expert today.