Informative research: Which specialists and technologies are in demand at remote work market nowadays?

Greetings! In the light of the latest trends in IT sphere every one of us may consider remote employment at some point. Of course, such way of life is not suitable for everyone, because it requires high levels of self-organization and motivation. However, more and more developers consider remote employment as they strive to work without being confined to one place.

Like any other drastic change in one’s life, transition to remote employment has a lot of issues and pitfalls to consider. Perhaps, the most important questions are the following:

Where can you find remote work?

What skills do you need to have?

How much do remote employees earn?

We decided to search for the answers to these questions ourselves. The results of this search turned into a rather comprehensive research. Are you interested? Then you’re welcome to look below the cut!

Not so long ago we created a small service which mails CVs of those seeking remote employment to the potential employers, free of charge. Our idea led us to Product Hunt project, we got some useful feedback and a list of more than 200 companies which subscribed to receiving CVs of potential employees. We also interviewed most of our subscribers, which allowed us to put together a rather detailed report. We hope that it will help to dispel some of your doubts and make the first step towards finding remote work.

Interviewees: Companies

As mentioned above, we sent our subscribers, in this case companies, some simple questions. Over 200 companies took part in the poll, most of them were startups.

We asked them to state their annual turnover to assess (at least indirectly) how much these companies are ready to spend on their employees. Here is the average annual turnover of the interviewed companies:

Interest of small companies is quite justified. Expenses of hiring a remote employee are several times lower than that of a regular employee, because there’s no need to rent additional working places and carry any other office expenses. Moreover, insurance events, which companies are wary of in the beginning, can happen only in the nightmare of an overworked human resources department head.

Official invitation and working visa are definitely out of question, because small companies simply can’t afford this.

At the same time, cases of a large organization hiring remote employees from another country are quite common, but don’t get too excited about it. Local residents are also quite eager to find remote work. For any company the decision to hire a resident of their country for remote work is convenient and more practical, because the lack of all necessary documents (for example, SSN in the USA) won’t allow for a legal solution. No large and well-known company will break a law for the sake of one employee.

There are also cases of mass outsourcing for project development, for example, to India. But in this case such expenses will pay back in the long term thanks to cheap labour. We are not interested in this option. Switching office work to remote work, then spending additional hours on occasional freelance commissions is not what we are looking for. Of course, in some rare cases, people are invited to work for a company with all the necessary documents provided, but this happens only after a fierce competition with millions of developers, for example, from India.

Interviewees: Candidates

An interesting detail: average age of all candidates who took part in our research — 314, to be exact (which is the amount of CVs we have processed since the start of our service) — was far over 20.

Under 24 years old — 3 %

24–28 years old — 28%

28–35 years old — 46%

35–46 years old — 23%

16 years old — the youngest participant

57 years old — the oldest participant

Most of the participants had families, half of them also had children. The majority, of course, knew foreign languages, with some of them knowing more than one language apart from the native one.

Demand and Geography

Thanks to the use of Google Analytics tool for tracking incoming traffic and the data from our polls we managed to put together a map of geographic location of the companies which were most interested in remote employment.

USA 55%

Europe 25%

Asia 15%

Australia 5%

Most of the companies exercising remote employment are located in the USA. It is also where the first employers succeeded in using this method of employment.

Demand dynamics

We asked companies to state the number of existing employees, the number of the employees they used to have and how many they want to hire. This allowed us to put together a diagram which shows demand dynamics. The y-axis shows the average number of remote employees per company.

A rather positive tendency is quite obvious. As for the prospective employees, companies give us the following picture:

Technology demands

If you are in doubt whether your skills are of interest to the remote employment market, you may find the diagram below quite useful. It shows the percentage of working areas which companies selected when they subscribed to our service.

Total:

Front-End:

Back-End:

App Developer:

Marketing Manager:

System Administrator:

As we have learned, there is also lack of certain specialists. These are future employees the demand of which is not satisfied. In this case the supply is represented by the number of CVs that include required skills.

Earning levels

This is probably one of the most important factors which can help you make the decision about switching from office work to remote employment. Below is the diagram of earnings in popular working areas. The graph shows the annual earning levels. We had to combine some of the areas because it seemed impossible to get the data separately for each of the areas.

Type of employment

Note that remote employment in a company differs from freelance, because most employers are interested in full-time work. Joint problem solving will require you to be available during the main working hours. The diagram below shows the percentage of full and part time employment and also internship.

Job requirements

Another important question to consider is how good you have to be to enter the remote employment market. Of course, if you have zero experience or you have just graduated, it is a good idea to postpone the search, because your efforts are likely to be wasted. At the same time internship employment happens quite often, but earning levels can be of little interest to the candidate. Sometimes you can find work with higher payment and fewer requirements in the center of Russia. However, you can use this option if you would like to compliment your CV with something like “Internship in a UK company” or you just need to get experience, the lack of which hinders your further path.

Diagram below shows work experience levels which companies expect from their future employees.

Next diagram shows other factors considered by the companies apart from working experience.

Which tools are popular among the employers?

One of the important things in organizing the work of remote employees are tools to monitor the quality of work and communication, as well as tools that make virtual office interaction easier. Diagram below illustrates popularity of services used by the employers. If you have never used some of them, we recommend at least taking a look at the most widely spread tools, so that you wouldn’t have to learn something new in a hurry after being hired.

The most popular version control systems

The most popular instant messengers for company work

In conclusion we would like to finish with the same thing we have started our story with. Remote employment is a great way to free yourself from daily routine which office provides from Monday to Friday, for example, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. At the same time you need to understand that such work has its own specifics and that is why for some people it is easier to work at the office according to a standard schedule. Otherwise, working at home can turn into a nightmare where you will have to force yourself to sit at the computer to write at least a couple of code lines.

Practice shows that constant self-improvement, right motivation and an unstoppable desire to bring those dreams to life (to everyone their own) will open the unknown world of remote employment for you. And if you can improve your self-control, you will get a great amount of free time, which is hard to imagine when you work in the office from day to day.

We sincerely hope that this report will be of use to anyone who, like ourselves, would like to free themselves from office routine.

Thank you for your attention! Good luck in finding remote job of your dreams!

P.S. In making of our report we used only the data which we received through our poll. Numbers can differ from official reports.

http://talentboard.me/candidate