How To Get Remote Jobs With No Experience Guide

There are more remote jobs available today than ever before but how do you land that first remote job if you have no experience?

Some people were “lucky” in that the Covid pandemic turned their regular jobs into remote jobs and they got the experience that way but what if that wasn’t you?

Is it possible to get remote jobs with no experience?

Of course, it is, it might be a little more challenging than for those who’ve already done remote jobs but many remote jobs will happily consider someone who can show they understand the job description and have relevant prior experience that can be adapted to the work at hand.

The Remote Job Search Without Experience Made Easy

If you follow the steps below, you’ll find that your job search becomes much easier and that you can land legitimate online jobs without having a huge amount of expertise gained elsewhere.

What Can You Do Already? Data Entry? Phone Work?

Before you hit up the remote job boards, it can help to take stock of the kind of experience that you do have.

Have you done data entry? Worked in entry-level jobs in other industries? Carried out a social media specialist job with your current employer?

Do you have a high school diploma or bachelor’s degree?

You see, more employers, particularly if they’re looking for anything above entry-level positions know that they’re not likely to find the fully formed worker of their dreams.

If, after all, they could already thrive in similar remote work, they’d probably already have a job and even be bored by it.

So ignore the “essentials” list on the job board, that’s there to discourage those without faith in themselves, and by the time you finish this process, you’re going to have plenty of faith in yourself.

What Skills Are You Missing?

So, now ask yourself when looking at a job listing.

What skills do they want that I don’t yet have? Have I done something similar before that I could adapt? Are these skills that I could pick up quickly?

If you look at most entry-level remote jobs, you will see that despite the appeal of that flexible schedule there’s not much in the job summary that you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.

And if you’re aiming above entry-level remote jobs? The same is true though you may need more real-world experience.

Connect Your Experience With Their Needs

Now, things get a little more complex – you need to connect what you’ve done to what the company needs.

This is best shown by illustrating transferable skills where you worked to gain experience and which had specific outcomes.

Always Be Specific When You Can Be

So, for example, you’ve researched companies and decided to target entry-level remote jobs in customer care.

You’ve worked in a call center before and you know that you can do better than an entry-level position if they can see the relevance of your previous experience.

So, instead of saying “managed a team that made customers satisfied” – you could say “I led a team of 10 customer care agents and we achieve a 97% customer satisfaction metric and won the care team of the year award.”

This helps the company contact to see that you’re more than an entry-level agent in a way that is meaningful to their business.

Whenever you can, include numbers, they make your application sound and feel more specific and they tell the employer that you are comfortable with your performance being measured too.

Learn To Use Some Remote Communication Tools

If you want to work remotely and land that plum new job, then you should consider the tools that you’re going to be expected to use and whether you’re hoping to join the ranks of remote account executives, virtual assistants, or graphic designers, then you’re going to have to be able to communicate effectively.

The good news is that these tools are normally easy to install and even easier to learn (and usually, they’re free for small businesses and individuals too).

If you remember how easy it was to learn to use social media to talk to friends, it’s almost as easy to learn remote communication tools – it’s not hard, like say, learning a foreign language.

So, round up Slack, MS Teams, Zoom, Skype, etc., and familiarize yourself with them. You don’t need a community manager to show you you can work online and use these tools in a work-from-home job – you just need a little personal initiative.

Learn To Use Some Remote Project Management Tools

The other kind of tool that is super common in remote working is project management tools.

And whether you end up as a travel consultant or a graphic designer, you will find that these too are easy to install and learn the basics of.

Asana, Trello, BaseCamp, etc. all have trial versions that you can get on to your computer and once you learn these packages? You can find companies that are looking for these skills and send them a CV and cover letter.

Undertake Some Basic Training IN The Areas You Want To Work In

And in this vein, if you carefully read the written text of the job adverts that appeal to you and you realize that all the jobs have specific skills they are looking for – go and get some basic training in these areas.

Employers love people who show initiative and learn by themselves who would you give your jobs to? The job seeker who has spent days studying design concepts to fulfill their career ambitions or the person who skipped the lesson plans and just expects to be trained on the job?

The job might say that they require experience but sometimes, all the experience required is some prior learning that can be molded once you’re on the job. Work experience often isn’t as “essential” as the adverts say it is.

Do Some Keyword Research

Then, before you create your resume it’s time to spend some time researching the industry itself – talk to companies as they talk to their customers and you’ll be able to access the kinds of role that you might have thought impossible.

Google jobs and sites in the industry, check out their social media, look at the words that come up again and again, they are your keywords.

Don’t try and stuff them in where they don’t make sense but do make sure that any correspondence and your resume has a healthy scattering of these keywords. You might also add some of these keywords to any professional social media presence you have.

By that, we mean social media such as LinkedIn rather than TikTok.

Build Your Resume Or Digital Portfolio

Finally, you can impress companies by creating a digital resume or portfolio too.

This is easy to do, you just need to use a WordPress theme on a cheap website (you can get a deal on sites like Namecheap for a year’s hosting for $30 – that’s all you need) and then show that you are the person they’re looking for online as well as offline.

Clients and companies love this because it shows you’re technically capable and willing to create the presence for your career search that is meant to wow them.

If you take care of the company and its customers as well as you take care of your image, you’re going to be a huge asset for them.