Remote Work Europe
Remote Work Europe is for employees, freelancers, sole traders, solopreneurs, digital nomads, consultants, and anyone who defies categorization while making a living outside the traditional location-dependent relationship — for the independent operator, wherever you are. The remote revolution is already well underway, and we're bringing you insight and inspiration from the frontiers of freelancing and the rubicon of remote, to help you build a life and a living without borders.
Formerly the 'Future is Freelance' podcast, our show has evolved as work evolves - to a fluid and flexible blended approach to life and value creation.
Remote Work Europe
Remote Realities: Busting Freelancing Fables and Remote Red Herrings
Have you ever considered whether everything you thought you knew about remote work and freelancing was based on stereotypes, outdated ideas, and misconceptions?
Buckle up as we take on some common myths about freelancing and remote work that might be holding you back. We expose the false notion that there's a special section of remote jobs that require no skills or experience, and offer some down-to-earth insight about the various schemes, from trading to MLM, that might try to persuade you otherwise.
With the right understanding and approach, almost all professional jobs can be done remotely - there is not a particular 'remote work industry' you need to learn about. But great remote roles are not going to come handed to you on a plate.
Transitioning to remote work can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. In this episode, we explore the hurdles you might face when trying to land your first remote job. It's not as easy as posting a request for work; you are competing with countless others, and recruiters screen through numerous applications before they even consider a candidate. We discuss how to make yourself stand out, attract the right attention, and make a strong case for your skills. Moreover, we explore the intricacies of switching to remote work or freelancing, the importance of developing a personal brand, and the value of keeping an open mind.
So, join us for an enlightening discussion and get a reality check on the world of remote work and freelancing.
It's time for some tough love!
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Here's to your own remote future 🤩
You're listening to, the Future is Freelance podcast, the show for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slow-mads, consultants, remote workers, in-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. In fact, we're here for everybody who defies categorization and makes a living and a life their own way. Every Freelance Friday, we're bringing you expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing to help you achieve success with your borderless business, whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms. And today we're going to look at remote work in particular, and it's going to be a bit of a reality check. I think I also run the remote work Europe community, as many listeners to this podcast will know, and I've been getting a lot of the same sort of questions, the same sort of answers and going round and round in circles explaining the same thing rather much too often lately. There are a number of myths I wanted to bust there for and a number of things I wanted to talk about today on the podcast to really try and get to the heart of some of the misunderstandings about remote work and freelancing and why people aren't achieving success in the way they want to, why sometimes people aren't asking the right questions. Because I want more people to enjoy the lifestyle that those of us on the other side of that do, and that's got to start with defining what remote work is and what it isn't.
Speaker 1:In the first place, it might be freelancing freelancing there's a subset of remote work but it's important to really get clear that remote work is simply a description of a way that you do all sorts of different kinds of work. We get posts and I get a million DMs a week, and we get comments on the podcast and on the videos and on the website as well, which all basically amount to the same thing how can I get into remote work? What jobs can I do? Basically, people are asking for remote jobs in something that they've never done before, because they feel that remote jobs are a separate category to the rest of their lives and careers and whatever professional skills and experience they've developed. So this is the thing I want to unpack today, because there isn't this subset of remote jobs which are somehow special for you to opt into without any skills or experience.
Speaker 1:I think that we are culpable in terms of the remote work and freelancing and digital nomad media, to have let this kind of misconception build up. I think I've said this before, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode. There is way too much content about the lifestyle and about the image and the stock photography of the digital nomad on the beach in a hammock, sitting under a palm tree or whatever. We don't talk enough about the work. We don't focus enough on what pays for that lifestyle, that trip, how you build financial security, how you build professional skills and reputation. Sometimes, therefore, my podcast and content might be a little bit more boring compared to the people who've got the skiing shots or the beaches and so on. I don't even do Instagram. I'm not about the visual side of things. I'm about the reality, and that's why I wanted to do this episode about the realities of remote work, because it really is different to what a lot of people seem to think it is.
Speaker 1:There are people doing remote work for all sorts of industries and organisations. There are actually very few jobs that cannot be done remotely these days. Whether you're allowed to do them remotely by a particular employer, that can be highly variable for a number of reasons which we'll unpack later on. The point I want to get across is that there isn't this bucket of jobs called remote jobs where you have to have knowledge of digital marketing or data entry or sales that are somehow separate from all the other jobs and careers in the world. Things like surgery and so on can now be done remotely. They're not usually, but there are so many things, from teaching to developing to creating, to every office or admin job that you can imagine. Most of that work can now be done remotely. In fact, it has always been done remotely, even when people went to a central office in order to do it, I'd argue. For the last couple of decades at least, most of their actual work, their communications and conversation has had a remote element to it, whether they're on a phone call to a client in another country or they're pinging into a server that's in a different location or in a cloud location somewhere.
Speaker 1:That is remote work. It doesn't matter where you do it. Simply changing your location shouldn't be the big deal that it is. It's not this separate category that people seem to think that it is. Obviously, some of this comes from the employers, from the hires, from the organisations who were still reluctant to engage with remote work.
Speaker 1:We've been through this huge change where four years ago yes, it's four years ago coming up towards the end of 2023 and I'm recording this. It's funny when I started planning the Healthy, happy Homeworking book, it was going to be a single book at that point because I was coming up to my 20-year anniversary of working from home, which I thought I knew everything there was to know about. Of course, at that point, most people working from home still had a bit of a mystique about it, a desirability. None of us knew what was going to hit us in 2020 and everything changed. There was a huge global change to working from home, to working remotely. At that point, a great many people and a great many managers had it proven to them that work could be done remotely. Whether that was the ideal situation and certainly whether doing it at home, from lockdown, was an ideal situation, that was very different. But alongside that social shift, we had huge amounts of technological development and funding, and apps that people were only using in quite narrow sections of the working world suddenly became everyday adjectives, even verbs. You can zoom someone. We never said that four years ago outside of our weird little remote bubble that some of us lived in, I'm afraid answers didn't generally zoom people that much often anyway, but everything changed four years ago.
Speaker 1:We recognise that Now we're having this backlash where people maybe don't want to work from home, they want to work from anywhere. There are difficulties with that. Some employers, even zoom, are trying to get people back to the office. So strange times were in and some people have had that taste of working from home during the pandemic and now they want to get a fully remote role because they really appreciated the freedoms that that unlocked and they want to carry on with that. But for some reason, they might think they have to change jobs or even change career into something called remote work, whereas what they're doing is already working remotely. So we need to get past the reasons for this and we need to recognise that things are changing. They're just not changing quickly enough.
Speaker 1:I've been freelancing for six years and one of the things I love about that is the sheer speed and agility of it. If I decide to pivot, do something new tomorrow, I can just do it. I don't have to get anybody's permission. I don't have to run it by Funders or committees or layers of management and so on. Corporate life is different. You know, this sea change that we had in 2020 was, for many, deemed an emergency solution and the norm was the office, and that's where we're all going back to afterwards, so it's like a reversion to the mean. You can understand why this is happening to an extent.
Speaker 1:There are also huge issues about the simple logistics of compliance and hiring people. Employment law is rooted in people from one sort of national jurisdiction going to a certain location and place for a certain number of hours per week Doing a thing together there, and the reward in the employment contract that would be a salary is based on them showing up and doing the thing together so everybody can see everybody else. You have an output. You know industrially that would have been a widget or something that they work on a production line and that is what employment law is rooted in around the world. So Lots of organizations don't have good ways of measuring what people are actually creating in the knowledge work economies. They used to pay for hours or logged on time and rather than the actual outputs and results.
Speaker 1:These shifts are complicated also that employment law is based regionally, at a country level or a state level in parts of the world, and If you want to hire somebody who's in another country, there are ways to do this now, but it's complicated, it's difficult and for the employer it's generally Expensive or onerous in ways that actually, if we just hired somebody in our city, we could give them a normal employment contract. They could come into a monthly or weekly meetings weekly, you really gotta call it hybrid rather than remote but that's another podcast and we can just kind of do what we're used to without having to bend over backwards to hire somebody in another country who might be perfect for the role. But we'd have to figure out a different kind of contract to create with them, and as an employer we might not Be familiar with that, we might not want to go down that road, and so you can see that quite often, if you see a perfect remote job but it happens to be in a country where you're not a tax resident, you might not gonna get that job because it's just too difficult for them to hire you unless you are really special and they really want you and they can't get that person, that role filled more locally, in which case there are solutions such as native teams that we had on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, such as freelancing. You know you might be able to make a contract with them as a freelancer. So these are all things I would encourage you to explore If you want to be hired by somebody not in the place where you live, but simply contextualizing it from the employer point of view. They often won't bother to go down that route if they can solve things more simply and easily on their doorstep, and that's simply the reality.
Speaker 1:I think another issue that we don't talk about enough is trust. To hire somebody to work for you remotely means that you have to trust them, and We've already seen that this that just can be abused. And employment people can steal time, they can still resources. Pre pandemic, when remote work was a privilege offered to people in in particular responsibilities or with niche skills, this was less of a problem. But we still have this category of technology and products that's emerged around this for time checking, for monitoring what people do on their own Computers, often even in their own homes, which seems to me Unspeakably invasive, that Employers somehow don't have a way of recognizing the value you're contributing. Are you creating enough intellectual property? Are you Generating enough value? Are you making enough profit for the company?
Speaker 1:Because ultimately, if it's a commercial job, everything should be tied back to that bottom line, but often people don't have ways of measuring this because they're not set up that way. So instead they measure things like how long are you spending logged into a certain Application on your computer? Is your mouse jiggling frequently enough in the corporate apps? Is is your green light staying on in slack to indicate that you haven't nipped off to the law or the pub? And we're seeing categories of products emerge like there's literally a thing you can buy now on Amazon to jiggle your mouse from time to time to make it look like you're active at your desk even if you're not. This is this is the crazy world that we've ended up in.
Speaker 1:So lack of trust is a huge issue for people, for managers, who are used to walking around and seeing people apparently being active, I'm assuming, when I actually looking at their screens. Who knows what those people in offices are doing all the time? But there's a reassurance that comes from having them physically present. So for you, as the potential remote worker, you need to see this from that point of view and realize that If you want someone to give you a job to do completely remotely, there's a huge amount of trust involved and somehow you need to satisfy those current worries that that employer is going to have if they've never worked with you before. If you want to do something different that you've ever done before, you know you've got to somehow overcome that, build that trust in integrity with that employer that you can do the work. Yes, that's the first thing and that's what the job application process is all about interviewing and testing skills but the second you have to prove that you will do the work, that you are doing the work in a way that they can measure, that they can be satisfied by, in order to pay you the salary for that which you've agreed.
Speaker 1:So you can see that it's challenging for employers sometimes, if they haven't set up their business to be visible in that way for them to see what you're creating. They might find it easier to just have people under their noses, and it can require everything, and that's why you tend to end up with Companies that are fully remote, companies that are pretty much office based, with rare exceptions. One of the things you need to do when you're looking at applying for remote jobs is think really hard about how you're going to demonstrate that Integrity, how you're going to demonstrate that people have trusted you, how you're going to demonstrate that you've seen things through Without direct supervision. Other things in your personal life you can bring in. When I was hiring for remote roles pre pandemic, when nobody had done it, I used to look out for clues, like one of the things. I once hired somebody who'd written a novel Because for me that showed that they could see a personal project through in their own time without any management, and they'd done that on their own and they'd got it to publication. Somebody else who'd trained for a marathon Months of commitment and following a program without supervision. Those are the kind of ways you can demonstrate trust.
Speaker 1:So can you see that if you're hiring for a fully remote vacancy, what you're looking for is that needle in a haystack? Because, first of all, if your vacancy is truly work from anywhere now these are rare If you really are prepared to do whatever it takes to hire the best person in the world, then a lot of people are going to want to come and work for you. Now there are truly fully remote companies who hire at scale, and some of those exemplars like automatic get lab do is. We take their roles in the newsletter for remote work Europe, because we know that they are truly remote first and that wherever you are, they will make an acceptable contract with you. But we also know that when we put in a role for something like a product manager, they will get it's almost certainly thousands of applications for that role. So how on earth are you going to stand out amongst those? You really have to recognize that huge amount of competition. So you have to recognize, first of all, that no human is going to look at thousands of applications, that you're going to start with an automated process. So there are certain things that they request. You have to respond in a certain way and this is what you're up against.
Speaker 1:So when we get people who come into the remote work Spain or remote work UK Facebook groups and they want to make a post that says I'm looking for a remote job, I'll do anything, how on earth do they think they're going to bridge that gap? No, we don't even let those posts in standalone because the groups that do. We've seen remote work jobs groups where it's just basically every single post is somebody saying please give me a job, and every reply is someone saying contact me, I've got this amazing opportunity and we will go into those later. But if you make yourself apparently desperate, then there are people who respond to that and take advantage of it? Of course there are. That's human nature. Human nature is often not pretty. What we do in remote work Spain, for example is we have a monthly thread where we say everybody who's looking for work, you can post on this thread if you're looking for what you can do from Spain. And we encourage people to really sell themselves, to use that comment to link out to their portfolio. They're linked in their work history. You know, whatever it is that demonstrates what they've got to offer and to write a really good post so that if a recruiter or a higher happens to be looking for that one person and maybe they don't want to go down the route of advertising and get in 2000 applications, then maybe they can join those dots together. And then at the end of the month I take that post and I share it in LinkedIn tag recruiters and I try to get as many eyeballs on it as possible because that's the only chance of this needle in haystack matching.
Speaker 1:If you're applying for an advertised job, you've really got to do that work for yourself of standing out in the pool of applicants and really people are going to look for the best fits even long before they get down to testing skills. A lot of that can be done automatically. Now People are going to want to weed out anybody who hasn't got the right qualifications, who hasn't got the right experience, because why would they take the risk when they've got Possibly hundreds of applicants who meet all those requirements on paper? It's simply not worth their, their while, unless they're looking for something incredibly rare, in which case you are the only obvious person to hire anyway. So Posting in a Facebook group I'm really good at admin, please give me a job I do anything will not get you anywhere.
Speaker 1:Nor posting in a facebook group I really want to get into remote work. So what should I do? All I can reply is what do you do? What do you know? What are your professional skills? Then you need to find the remote employer who might be hiring for those skills, or you need to figure out how to offer those skills independently, as a contractor, as a freelancer, because there are no remote jobs that I can hand anybody on a plate. It doesn't matter how plaintiff the DMs and I stop replying to the DMs because I can't. You know, I wouldn't have time to make podcasts or work for my own clients If I tried to reply to everybody who said I'm desperate and I need a job, and for people who don't say what they actually do, what they have to offer, you've got no chance of somebody looking at that thing.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna hire that person. Nobody hires you just because you want to work remote. Nobody hires you just because you're desperate and you haven't got any work. Sorry, this sounds really harsh and really horrible, but a reality check is needed. You know this is what you're up against. You have to sell yourself. You have to sell what you do, not what you want to do, but what you can demonstrate and prove a track record in.
Speaker 1:If you haven't got that, if the work you've done throughout your life cannot be translated into remote, I would first say find a coach. Find someone to work one to one with. I do not do one to one work with clients at the moment, but I can connect you with people who do. Find someone to go through those skills and experiences you had and draw out the transferable skills. Find the things that might be of interest to an employer in twenty. Twenty three is open to hiring you remotely because you have to do that, traveling from where you're at to what they need. Nobody's gonna reach back to you when they've got loads of other people to choose from. You have to somehow get yourself to the front of you by packaging up what you do In a way that is going to qualify you to secure that remote job release, to secure yourself into the next stage of the process, whether that skills testing or interviews and so on. The other thing is, if you post in remote work Europe groups saying I'll do anything, I'm desperate, that is going to attract a ton of responses you do not want. Let's just remind ourselves legitimate remote work requires real skills, qualifications and experience.
Speaker 1:We been out literally hundreds of posts per week which are complete scams, telling people that you can you can work from home, you can work around your kids. That's what we do. They use this copy and pasted wording, whether it's an MM or it's high ticket closing or it's trading for X. Reselling travel as a kind of multi-level marketing thing seems to be the latest one or up in through the groups and we just keep deleting them because they're not real. None of them link to an actual employer, none of them link to a job vacancy, none of them have any information about what kind of contract they're offering. They all say that you can do it part time if you're a student or a parent, and that all they're trying to do is get your contact details and get you off the platform, either to direct message or often straight to something like telegram, and then goodness what they're going to do with your information. So we don't let those posts into the communities, we don't give them a platform.
Speaker 1:But if somebody posts publicly on any social media that they're looking for remote work, that they really need a job, then you will get those messages in your DMs. I can't do anything about that. Make it any any other social media or community leader. If you say publicly I really need a job, then there are people who are going to exploit that and they'll be trying to get you to join their down line to sell stuff. They'll be trying to get you to Run different kinds of apps and software. They'll be trying to get you to pay them to join programs or exclusive lists of remote opportunities that I've just told you don't exist.
Speaker 1:So you really really need to go into this with your BS filters, incredibly highly tuned. Use that block button liberally and you know, just don't even go down that route, because the data grab is the is the least worst thing that can happen. Once you get people telling you to install dodgy apps, to install this crypto wallet, you don't really understand, but you've got to add some funding to it first. I mean, I can't believe the stuff that people get asked to do, but because they're desperate and because people take this time to build up a little bit of a rapport and a relationship through those messaging apps which are well away from public gaze, then this is what can happen and this is how people end up Sucked into things that they're better self would actually be able to avoid. We don't platform these people, as I've said, but they will find you if you start advertising that you're looking for work, so what can you do instead?
Speaker 1:Then you have to think more creatively. If you want to work remotely, you might have to step sideways. So you worked in a laboratory and you were doing a hands on activities In a lab. You won't be able to do that remotely. But are there other things within that industry, or specialist knowledge of those enzyme tests, or something could be used to market those enzyme tests or to quality test them or to create new packaging for them that you design online. I don't know anything about enzyme testing. I'm completely stepping in the dark here just to try and illustrate ways that you can think about. This is the thing I do face to face. How could I package that up in ways that I might not have thought of? Another example might be teaching.
Speaker 1:Language teaching is a huge one for remote workers in Europe, and there's a whole other podcast to be made about whether the fact that you are a native English speaker means you're qualified to teach it. There are fewer and fewer opportunities available to people who just want to teach without any qualifications. That they do still exist, and you can join a language academy and you can teach. But I again, I would encourage you to think how else could I use those skills? Translating, interpreting that's still a thing, but it's a thing that will increasingly be subsea and by automation, so I wouldn't go down there from a career point of view. What about could you create information products with those language skills, those teaching skills? Could you create a standalone self completion course in business? And I see Spanish or something Again off the top of my head.
Speaker 1:I don't know what the demand is, but think about how you can package up your skills to offer them online. Could you really niche down the fact that you can teach English? What about the industry that you worked in for 20 years? Could you go and specialize and teach English in that vertical and charge a great deal more per hour for it? Because you're combining the teaching with the expertise?
Speaker 1:There was a great example from season one. We talked to Russ Pierce, who teaches aviation English, because every pilot in the world has to have this base vocabulary of English and he's a pilot, so he's got those two things and put them together to come up with something where he will get hired by people from all over the world because only he has this spoke offering and he's put himself out there. He's got the website to pick up. When people are searching for that, they'll find him, and that's what you need to operate globally. You can't just say I want to teach English because that's a race to the bottom on our rates and you're competing with native speakers from all over the world, so we're lining your skills with what the market needs is really important. You have to make sure that it's obvious that you're the person to hire for it and if somebody finds you on social media because they're searching for aviation English or legal German translations or something that's great. They find your website, but then what happens when they look at your social media? Does that check out? Is this clearly the right person, or am I seeing something that's a bit weird or actually off putting? Does everything line up? Does everything check out? You might need to think. Well, actually I'm not going to get a job with an employment contract, with a guaranteed income, with that security.
Speaker 1:You're listening to the Future is Freelance podcast. I'm not doing the intro again, but I'd like you to just remember that freelancing and jobs these used to be two completely separate things, different ends of a spectrum. You can put them in different buckets and people did move between one and the other, but it meant crossing a chasm and taking a leap into something completely different. Now I would describe those two extremes as the ends of a spectrum from the full blown solopreneur who has their own business, who works one gig to the next or operates as a completely independent operator, and at the other end, you've got the 40 hour a week, rock solid employment contract. In between those spaces, there is a multitude of options that I encourage you to explore If you've got your eye on that location, independent career.
Speaker 1:But you happen to be employed somewhere where that's never going to happen and you've had that conversation and it's never going to happen. But you know you could use your skills professionally somewhere else. Then maybe there are opportunities. Internally you could become more of an employee perner. You could start shaping your role towards things that can be done in a location independent way, or towards departments and areas of activity where you know there is greater flexibility and consideration on offer for that kind of work. You might find that there are projects you can engage in that will advance your career, that could take you to another location and somebody actually pays you to go and pays your relocation. That might solve your remote yearnings just to go and live somewhere else for a bit and check it out.
Speaker 1:You might find that that's not enough for you. You want to take a further step. So actually I know I could do this bit of my job that's really in my zone of excellence and joy. And there's another bit I hate. What if I was to consult in that one area? What if my current manager was my first client as a consultant? Yes, these are big steps if you're used to that security of that employment contract. But having the conversation at your next review might just open that up. It might make them value you more anyway, if you're a high performer, they need to know that the fact that you can't work remotely is actually impacting your loyalty and your likelihood to stick around. They might suddenly become a bit more flexible anyway.
Speaker 1:But if not, is there a way that you could work part-time? For example, could you work on a contraction basis? Could you work as a consultant? Could you work in a very flexible hybrid way where you only had to be on site one or two days a month and you could combine travel around that? The next step from that might be to if I'm not doing this full-time for my employer anymore, who else could I do it for? If I'm going to be a consultant, I really need more than one client just for that security. So what are those transferable skills? They might not lead me straight to an advertised job contract, but they might lead me into being able to offer that service on a far more niche and nuanced ad hoc basis and before you know it, you've got a great freelance career growing there because you've identified that thing, that superpower that you can bring to the world to add value, and you realize you can do it on your own terms.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to get across is between that extreme of employment at one end and pure freelancing at the other. There is a vast spectrum. There are fractional roles, there are direct shifts, there are contracts, there are part-time roles, there were interim positions. All of these things are worth exploring. If you're thinking I really want to work remotely but I've never stepped out of that nine to five, that full-time employment contract, then I would urge you to look along that spectrum without fear and try to see whether you could locate yourself anywhere along it, because a final reality check here is that employment contract might not be as rock solid as you thought it once was.
Speaker 1:Maybe it has been for years, but things can change so fast this last year or two. I mean, I work for a lot of tech and startup clients and it has been a bloodbath. I write about collaboration and the technology that was all being boomed and funded during the pandemic. Ironically enough, a lot of those are now cutting back. They're talking about the fact that they overhired and we need to trim 10% or something. I've seen really good people who I've worked for who my clients basically chucked out of what looked like rock solid jobs at well-funded organizations that simply decided they had to trim. And those people got trimmed, for whatever reason, and suddenly they've gone from that 40-hour week to nothing. A month's notice, a small payoff and that's it you're out. So that job for life might not exist anymore. Anyway, companies come and go. We've never seen a pace of change like the one that we're living with today. So I really urge you to start developing that at least that employee pronoun mindset.
Speaker 1:If you want to transition towards remote, whether you end up fully freelance or not, that's up to you. If you want to go down that route, let's keep in touch. I'll hold your hand. I'll help you. It's the best thing I ever did. But the first step towards it has to be recognizing that that job for life might not be what it was sold on the tin to you 20 years ago. Anyway, that kind of changed and you can change with it. You can get out in front of it and I know that if I lose a client as a freelancer, I've got my other clients to fall back on. Nobody can take away 100% of that work from me ever again, even if somehow I lost all my clients overnight. What I have got is an up to date portfolio and up to date linked in profile. I've got an audience that's listening to me on this podcast, in the newsletter, in the content I create. I have, in other words, my personal brand that I build up around that which will support me to move into my next piece of work. Whatever that is, I will have an open mind as to how the skills can best be used, but I know that I have a network to tap into when I need to find additional work.
Speaker 1:So many employees do not have that because they haven't cultivated it, because they haven't needed to. The only question mark about their job security is their annual employment performance review, and will that lead to a raise or not? There are people in jobs and industries where they're incredibly likely to be unlikely to be let go unless they do some some sort of gross misconduct, where things will just chug along. Those are the jobs and careers that our parents had, and they are becoming fewer and further between now. We have to move beyond that. We have to look differently and we have to look at the realities of remote working. Remote work is fantastic. It's out there for the taking. Great many roles can be done that way, but you won't necessarily step into one.
Speaker 1:If your current work cannot be renegotiated, you may have to step sideways. You may even have to step backwards. You might need to think well, okay, do I need to update my skills? Do I need to gain your qualifications? Do I need to show, do something to demonstrate to somebody that I'm able to do this? I don't need to work for free. That's almost never the right answer but you might need to find some voluntary work, for example, to demonstrate that you have the capacity to carry out work remotely in a way that's safe and trustable.
Speaker 1:To build up that evidence, that portfolio, to get someone to consider you, you might have to explore the different ways that you can actually legally do it in order to then go to a potential employer and say look, I'd be absolutely perfect for this position. I know I'm not a tax resident. In your country, we have a legal entity. So these are the options that I've explored and would like to present to you. You could use this employer record and this is how the cost could be born to split that out, such as our partnership with native teams, to remote work Europe. They can cost all that out for you. So you could take that to an employer and say this is what it would involve to hire me. You could say I'll work for you as a freelance contractor, but this is what I'm gonna need in order to have parity with the salary that you were offering, in order to recognize the fact that as a freelancer, I'll be responsible for my own holiday, my pension contributions, my social security, my risks of being sick and whatever. So all that stuff you have to work out.
Speaker 1:It's much harder than just going and checking a box of doing a job, but for those of us who've done it, the rewards are so great as well. You know, to get to the other side of that, you get used to figuring this stuff out. You get used to owning the responsibility for it, being in control of it. Again, you're not delegating that to somebody else to sort out your retirement savings or your health cover. If you're a solopreneur, you do this stuff for yourself. This is the cost of real remote work.
Speaker 1:You cannot get a remote job by putting your hand up and asking for one to be given to you, and some of this might, might sound really, really hard, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that reality check, but I'm not gonna keep posting pictures of people sitting on beaches Just magically doing drops, shipping or high ticket closing or coaching other people to sit on beaches with laptops, because it's not real if you're not gonna make a sustainable living and career that way to support the life you want to lead. Instead, I care about you and your career as a real remote worker, as a freelancer, as a contractor, an individual responsible for your own career and success, independence. Once you get that right and you get into that mindset and you learn how to market your skills and get the work coming to you, it is amazing. I will welcome you with open arms on the other side of that cousin. But I can't build the bridge for you. I will keep creating this content, giving you the materials, giving you the information resources.
Speaker 1:Come and join us at remote work Europe dot. Make sure you're on our mailing list for our jobs newsletter. Once a week we send out a list of remote vacancies. There might be one of them in. There is about 30 and every edition there might be one of them in there that you look at and think that could be me. It certainly won't be all of them or even many of them, but they might be one. That's a match, or it might be that it leads you to a jobs board where you find the perfect vacancy, or it might be a clue. I still which company is hiring remotely and you can have a look at their other roles. You can have a look at where they're growing, where they're getting funded. They clearly work remotely and they hire in my country, so I want to bookmark that. They might have an open call for CVs for people who are relocating. You might be able to follow the head of the department you would logically work for on linkedin and start to build a rapport and a conversation with them and comment on this stuff. All this is a lot more work than simply filling in an application for more sending in a CV. Yes, I know, and that's why this isn't for everybody, but if you can get real about remote work than a wealth of opportunity awaits you and I look forward to welcoming you there. Thank you for listening to.
Speaker 1:The future is freelance podcast. We appreciate your time and attention in a busy world and you're busy freelance life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow freelancer and help us grow this movement of independent entrepreneurs. If you rate and review the future is freelance in whichever app you're listening to right now, it really helps spread the word and that means we can reach more people who need to hear this message. Together, we can change the world and make sure the future is freelance. Don't forget, you can check out all our back episodes from other seasons and learn more over at future is freelance dot xyz. We're so grateful not only for our listeners, but for the contributions of our wonderful guests and for the production and marketing assistance of coffee like media. This is my middle miss, wishing you freelance freedom and happiness until our next show.