The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world in many ways. Sanitizers have become a part of our lives and seeing people without masks is more unusual than seeing people with masks. Another dramatic change that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought, has been in the way we work. Because of the numerous regulations, a lot of people started working from home and offices closed down. What was once considered unthinkable, became normal. The employment context is changing very quickly. And today, with the COVID-19 crisis, the trend towards working from home on the internet is on the rise. Even as offices are reopening in some parts of the world, a lot of people and firms are looking forward to working remotely for a long time, perhaps even permanently. 

A lot of people don’t want to go back to the office work model and have even found ways to earn some passive income while working from home. Earning passive income really helps you with your financial goals. Passive income is a type of income that you can earn without having to work or without your constant dedication. In other words, if you did nothing or practically nothing, that money or a very similar amount of money would continue to arrive in your account. A good measure of the attention that passive income requires is given to us by “The 4-hour work week”, a classic by Tim Ferris and the starting point for many of the people who seek to generate passive income. In other words, if you need to put in more than four hours a week, it may not be passive income. The simplest example of passive income is money earned through rent from a house that you own. However, owning a house isn’t easy and most young people can’t afford it. Though you can buy a house with right financial planning, we aren’t going to discuss it in this article. However, that’s not the only source of passive income in the world and you can generate it through multiple other sources as well.

In today’s world, it is very important that your money works for you while you are still asleep. Working online (at home or from anywhere in the world) can generate more income than a regular job.  For this reason, if at the moment you are one of those people who is considering working from home, working from the Internet or, simply, is looking for alternatives; this is the post for you. The future of work is definitely remote (except in some fields) and it’d be best if you embrace it rather than shy away from it. Let’s get started.

Working Remotely: Why is It Here to Stay

Why should you want to work from home?

What may be leading you to consider working from home directly affects the strategy you must use to achieve it. Here are some of the most common reasons:

• You want different schedules: you have grown tired of having your life organized by someone else and run under someone else’s schedule but now you want to be the one who takes the helm. You are interested in working from home because you want to be able to work whenever you want.
• Freedom of movement: In addition to having a flexible schedule, you want to be able to work from anywhere thanks to the Internet. Come on, when we talk about “work from home”, what you really mean is “working from home over the Internet.” Having wifi, your office is the world. You can go on a holiday and find a few hours to get some work done from a lounge chair next to your infinity pool. That way, you can have fun without losing any pay.
• You have lost your job or cannot find a new job: you need to generate income quickly and you see telecommuting as an option to earn money right now. You see it as an additional source of income/side hustle, because what you really want is to find a normal employed job.
• Better family conciliation: you have a child and you do not want to resign yourself to missing out on your child’s early years because you were very busy with work. The fact of being able to work from home is what interests you.
• You have retired: you have a lot of free hours and you would like to entertain yourself as well as get a bonus.
• You want to reinvent yourself professionally: you know that the Internet is the present and the future and your intention is to put your efforts into creating an online business.

We could go on mentioning more types of profiles but most people would fall into at least one of these categories. All of that can be summed up by saying, you should want to work from home if:

• You want to have the ability to work from anywhere (digital nomads).
• You want to get extra money thanks to the Internet.

Who is a digital nomad?

As far as professions of the future go, the digital nomad is someone many professionals would want to become. Data and statistics have shown that the labour market has been shifting dramatically towards that.

Today, this process has just been accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. But this was going to happen anyway.

The reality is that the Internet opened a new era where relations between workers and companies have completely changed. It is no longer necessary to be in a physical place for a certain amount of hours.

What is now in demand is independent and effective people who are capable of delivering results. How you organize yourself is up to you.

This new figure of professional who works through the Internet is what we call a digital nomad. Although when this term is used, many people might associate it with someone who loves to travel, the reality is that the concept has been enlarged. A digital nomad is a person who uses the Internet to carry out his/her occupation, as an employed person, freelancer or entrepreneur.

As you can see in that definition, within this term there are 3 profiles. You can feel linked with only one or combine characteristics of the 3.

How to start working online?

Unlike an employed digital nomad, a freelancing digital nomad can work for multiple clients. They might have regular, large scale business relationships with certain clients and smaller scale business relationships with others. Freelancers offer a wide variety of services to their clients. After receiving all that info, you may now have one of these phrases in your head:

• “Services? And what is that?”
• “I have no degree in the given field, what services am I going to give?”
• “I don’t like the career I’ve done and I don’t want to work on it. There are no more options?”

Let’s start at the beginning.

A “service” is doing work for someone else. And that “work” can be anything, the important thing is that it is useful. Because the higher the utility, the more value the customer perceives and the more demand there will be.

The other 2 options reflect the same concern: the fear of not knowing or the impostor syndrome.

But let us tell you one thing very clear:

Just because you don’t have a degree, does not mean that you do not know how to do anything. There is a brutal difference.

A college degree doesn’t teach you everything that you need to learn in life. A lot of times, you will waste hours learning things that will have no consequence in your personal or professional life. If you don’t have any problem with learning on the job, you can start working at lower levels in fields and learn the required skills as you grow.

What are some good skills to earn money as a digital nomad?

The first thing you need to do is decide what you want to do and figure out what you are good at. If you can utilize your abilities in a field that you are interested in/motivated by, earning money while working remotely won’t be difficult for you. If you are good with words, take good photos, make nice designs, have good knowledge about certain fields (which you have earned through a combination of self interest and education), you can use those skills to launch a successful work from home career

The first step so that you can professionally reinvent yourself working from home as a freelancer is this. You need to find a field of work with which you can help others but at the same time fulfil your professional goals and make yourself happy.

And forget about those fears about not having a career or not working in the field of your college degree. Your clients won’t care about what field you graduated in or what was your CGPA, as long as you deliver on the work that you promise, all will be well. Just stay motivated, always work towards improving yourself and learning new skills and you will do very well in this new world of remote work and digital nomads. Good luck!