The pandemic popped up this doubt in all of our minds. How can I work from home if I don’t have a degree? Well, Luis shares all the details.
A degree will definitely help in the process of applying for a remote job, but it’s not necessarily the only route.
There are millions of people who started as freelancers and didn’t need a degree to work remotely. All they required was to show proof of work in a portfolio and, step by step, build the list of clients and connections to develop themselves remotely.
Watch the video to find out more!
Luis:
Do you need a degree to work remotely? Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Virtual Coffee Chats with Louis. I am your host and we’re here to talk about remote work and have some coffee. Okay. So let’s do this. Okay. So do you need a degree to get a remote job, to find a remote job, to work remotely? Well, definitely helps applying for job interviews, I must say. A lot of businesses won’t give you the time of day if you don’t have, let’s say a marketing degree when applying for a marketing profession or an IT degree when applying for an IT job. So that dims the breaks, but that’s not necessarily the only route.
There is a lot of people, that’s my pat, who started as freelancers. And as a freelancer, you don’t really need the degree. All you need is to show proof of work, have a nice portfolio, and then gradually by building that portfolio and by building your list of clients, you can eventually create the connections necessary to get jobs.
Let’s say that a company that you’ve worked for in the past has an opening for something that you did for them before and you’re interested, you’re in the market for working remotely with them. Well, you can reach out and you can say, hey, I don’t really have the degree, but if you’ve worked with me before. That was my case. My degree is quite different from marketing. I started on dental medicine. I was a dental surgeon for many years, and I started doing some writing. I published some books. I did some writing on the side for clients. Some of the clients that enjoyed my writing started asking me about digital marketing. So I started studying that and then suddenly I was a digital marketer. And eventually, my biggest client offered me a full-time position remotely, so that’s how I did it and there’s no reason why, if you’re a great professional and a joy to work with remotely, the same can’t happen to you. Just don’t expect the road to be a smooth one.
My coffee is finishing. Yeah. I cheated. I was already drinking a bit before starting the recording, but oh, well. So that’s the reality. Does having a course help? Yeah, for sure. Having a degree definitely helps when applying for jobs, but you can try a halfway method, which is getting a nice online degree or online certification, that definitely helps, but if you have a nice portfolio with proof of work, not everyone is going to give you the time of day, but a decent enough amount of people and that’s the way you can shift your career from a career that you can do remotely, to a career that you can do remotely, just like I did.
You can find more tips like that and even some nice guides on how to prepare yourself for remote work at thinkremote.com. And if you enjoyed this conversation, please press like, subscribe and share. See you next week for another Virtual Coffee Chat with Louis. Bye-bye.
