Digital Nomad Career Guide: Your Path to Remote Work

1. Introduction: Back in 2014, I discovered the term that completely changed my life and turned my career path on its head, the term digital nomad. You see, I just finished up a study abroad program in the US, and the idea of coming home and getting a regular job in my home city of Brisbane Australia was just plain, depressing to me. That being said, I still wanted to become a professional, and so the idea of doing a working holiday on the ski fields of Whistler, Canada or volunteering on some random farm in a foreign country in exchange for housing, just felt like a short term solution. What I needed was to invest in a long term career that facilitated the lifestyle that I so greatly desired. And that's when I heard about this term digital nomad, which I'm sure a lot of you have heard of by now, but back more than ten years ago, this was a very nice idea. It started out with innovative digital entrepreneurs who realized that they could run their businesses from wherever they like. And then came the freelancers and remote employees. There's the global pandemic in 2020 to 2022, where companies were forced to adapt in order to allow their employees to work from home, we've seen an acceleration in the amount of people working remotely from distant countries of their own choosing. And as a digital nomad for more than eight years, I thought it was about time I created a class specifically for those that, like myself back in 2015, want to create a more flexible career where the work is performed on your terms from wherever you like. Whether that be from a co working space in Bali, a cafe in Istanbul, or a hotel room in Vegas. If that sounds like you, click on to the next video and let's get started. 2. Class Project: Your Digital Nomad Career Journal: While in this class, I will use myself and some of the connections I've made over the last eight years as examples. This class is ultimately about you and your career. So what I've done is I've put together a digital nomad career quiz for you to fill out. Usually in my classes, I teach a bunch of stuff and then introduce the class project at the end. But this class is going to be very interactive from the first video. Instead of teaching you how to be a digital nomad, I'm going to instead guide you through the process of determining your digital nomad career path. When it comes to your career, there are no right and wrong answers. It's totally up to you. So what I want you to do is go to the project section of the class. Click on the link to take you to the Interactive career quiz and fill in your answers as you watch the video for each step. You can wait until the end of the class to fill this out, but I think it's better if you complete it part by part. Once you've gone through the class, and you've written your answers, you can click on the button at the bottom to generate summary, and then click this button to copy your summary. Then you'll head over to the project section of this skill share class. Click the button to submit a project and paste in the project description. You'll notice here that the content of the field will include raw HTML, but this is absolutely fine. As once you submit your project, the HDL code won't show up on the other side. Now, other users can see and comment on your quiz results. Again, this step is entirely optional, but I want you to at least answer the questions in private as they are important prompts for self reflection. And now with your class project discussed, let's jump into the lessons for this class. 3. Step 1: Take stock of what you have currently: One of creating this new digital nomad career path is to reflect on where you're at currently. What current opportunities do you have in front of you? What experience and skills have you gained in your life so far? And what are your lifestyle and career goals that relate to remote work? Using myself as an example, I was born and raised in Brisbane Australia. I was a high school graduate. I was in university, almost finished a bachelor's of business. My major was in accounting. I was rather technically minded, and all I knew was that I definitely wanted to live abroad. I was also pretty young, around 23-years-old, unmarried and in a relationship with a girl who thankfully, was also interested in travel and living abroad. So to answer the first question, what current opportunities do you have in front of you? I was obviously born in a relatively rich first world country, which gives me an unfair advantage right out the gate. That can't be taken too lightly. So if you're from a country like the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or the United Kingdom, and you speak English, you're off to a great start. Second thing I would mention is any family or existing financial commitments. This is important for determining your level of risk tolerance if you have people that are financially dependent on you This makes the decision to go full time into freelancing or entrepreneurship a little riskier. So you might want to go down the path of looking for a remote job rather than starting your own business. And obviously, you've got to consider those other family members when you start to travel as well. The third thing would be any opportunities that are pretty unique to your situation. Do you have a family business you can enter? Do you have a friend or a family member who works in something remote already who can help you out? Have you built somewhat of a personal brand on social media that you can leverage? Do you have a strong network of high net worth individuals? Take stock of what advantages you have around you, whether large or small and write them down? For the second question, what experience and skills have you gained in your life so far, maybe you've gained some relevant skills from high school or university. Maybe you have an existing career with some transferable skills. For me personally, I hadn't had a career yet, but I was always a bit of a geek growing up, making my first website at the age of around 12-years-old and enjoying IT class at school. For yourself, if you already have a career that allows you to at least work from home, then it's likely you could continue to do similar work as a digital nomad. But even if your work is kind of physical, you still might be able to leverage those skills and the network you've built over the course of your career. My friend Denver, for instance, used to work with clients in person as a personal trainer before the pandemic, forced him to move his business online. Now he travels wherever he wants, and he just works remotely when he needs to. Another asset you could take from your existing career might be a network that you've built over the course of your career. So instead of utilizing the skills you have made over the course of your career, which may or may not be a remote skill, you could instead create a new service to your existing network or change roles in a company you already work for. The third question is, what are your lifestyle and career goals that relate to remote work. Perhaps your goal with being a digital nomad is to simply live full time in another city. Right now, for example, I'm based on the Indonesian Island of Bali, and I meet people all the time who spend most of their year here working and living. Alternatively, you might want to be bouncing between different cities, countries, and time zones. This is important to consider, as well, because certain digital nomad careers and work situations are more flexible than others. If, for instance, you work a remote full time job in the United States and live in Bali, you might be required to work US hours, which for a lot of people, would be hugely inconvenient. For others, they might do their best work at night. So it really depends. Remember, this is largely up to you and your unique goals and situation. Once you've taken stock of all the current opportunities in front of you, the experience and skills you have gained in your life so far and your lifestyle and career goals that relate to remote work. It's time to click onto the next video to look at the other side of the coin. What types of work can be performed remotely and on a full time or freelance basis? 4. Step 2: Determine what careers can be performed remotely: Fore I jump into a list of some of the best digital nomad career options out there. It's important to note that the number of possible ways to make money through the Internet is near infinite. So it's virtually impossible to create an exhaustive list covering 100% of the remote work options out there. Therefore, let's start with some principles that make remote work possible. If 100% of your work is performed via a computer, in other words, it requires no physical action besides typing on a keyboard and clicking on a mouse, then this is almost certainly a career that can be done as a digital nomad. The only exception I've ever heard of which contradicts this is if you work with very sensitive data. In which case, the data protection rules of the company or companies you work for could restrict your movements to some degree, or if there is some kind of legal restriction on what you're doing. Other than that, any work that requires absolutely no physical work at all can be, by its nature performed anywhere in the world provided that you have an internet connection. This does not mean that careers with a small amount of physical work are necessarily excluded. Case and Point, the example I shared earlier about my friend Denver. There was a large in person component to his business in the beginning, but he was able to work around that by figuring out how to deliver the same value remotely. Nowadays, his clients complete check in forms online and send videos of themselves performing various exercises via e mail or messages. This way, Denver can still provide feedback on all aspects of his client's training regimens without having to physically be in the same location. On the other side of the spectrum, you have work that is 100% physical. Now, maybe this will change in future as robotics get more and more advanced. But for now a career such as a construction worker who spends his or her days using machinery, shoveling concrete, and or laying brick walls, can't obviously do his or her job just using a computer. Maybe a high level construction manager whose hands aren't on the physical tools could do this, but I would assume that he or she would still need to be on site for a lot of the time. Then there are jobs which sit kind of in the middle of the spectrum, careers like photography or videography. In these careers, while the planning and editing of a video or photo shoot can be completed using a computer from anywhere in the world, the actual shooting needs to take place in a particular location, and therefore, any digital nomads who have this kind of career need to travel back and forth to a particular location or at the very least spend some of their time committed to a location. All of this being said, there are strategic ways to pivot your career into something 100% remote if your career does have somewhat of a physical component. My friend Mitch, for instance, used to be a wedding videographer, which obviously required him to be on set every weekend or so at the location where the wedding was taking place. After years of filming weddings, Mitch was still passionate about making films, but he grew tired of shooting weddings, and what the flexibility to travel more and for longer periods of time. In the time that I've known him, he transitioned out of shooting weddings, double down on his YouTube channel, and is now a full time content creator. So keep in mind that while your current career might require your physical presence right now, you can always pivot what you do into something that's 100% online, such as creating content or courses on what you do or becoming a remote coach or consultant to those wanting a similar career. Again, it's up to you what changes or compromises you're willing to make in order to make your career 100% remote, so I'll now throw it over to you to fill out that part of the journal. As an example, if you currently work as a trades person, would you be willing and happy to create a course on your trade to help other people learn it or some other online idea related to your profession? Be honest with yourself. If the answer is no, then it's likely that you'll have to look in a completely different direction into a path that's already 100% remote by its nature. If there isn't a way to turn your current career into something remote that you're actually aligned with, then maybe it's time to look at a new career. And this is exactly what we'll look at in the following two videos. 5. Step 3: Discover the 3 Styles of Remote Work: I mentioned in the introduction of the class, digital nomads were exclusively entrepreneurs in the past. But since more and more services have moved into the cloud, the nature of work for the entire knowledge worker economy has shifted, especially since the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020 to 2022. If I was making this class ten years ago, I would be advising you to start an online business. But since the pandemic, especially, it's become much easier to make a remote work income without having to take the risk of starting your own business. Of course, creating your own business is one of the three styles of work you can do to make a living online, and therefore become a digital nomad, but there are two other options that have become increasingly more common. If you don't want to go down the risky and often difficult path of creating your own business, you can instead work for others as an employee or a freelancer. So here are the three categories of remote work. With online business being the highest risk with the highest level of flexibility and autonomy, and remote employment falling on the other side of the spectrum being a style of work where you often have to work a certain amount of hours during a certain time zone and making a certain amount of consistent money on a regular basis. Different styles of work suit different people. I know a bunch of people who have remote jobs that force them to work in certain time zones. Often, they have to work nights, for example, in the case that their work is in the United States, but they live in Bali, I mean, this wouldn't work for me personally because I prefer a more flexible work situation that allows me to choose my own work hours and a situation where I can take a random weekday off if I want to or scale up and down my workload based on what other things I have going on, which, as a digital nomad, might mean doing something related to the destination that I chose to travel to in the first place. And then there's those that seem to be natural entrepreneurs who are smart, driven, and self disciplined enough to create a business on their own. Again, the path you go down depends a lot on the kind of person you are and your own life and career goals. For those of you who are entrepreneurial enough to create your own business, I'll leave you to do your own research because as the boss of your own company, you won't have to answer to anyone about where you perform your work. Provided the work you do within your own business is not blocked by the need to do any physical work, I, the stuff we talked about in the last video, then you can just pick up your laptop and go anywhere. Your business is now your career, and you've found your digital nomad path. For the rest of you, who are still wondering what skills you could learn to start freelancing or working as a remote employee, I'll meet you in the next video to cover some of the best career options for life as a digital nomad. 6. Step 4: Learn about the 4 best career paths: This video is not scripted. I'm just going to go off script here and talk about the four best career paths of digital nomads, but I've got my slide show here to guide me. So let's jump straight into it, okay? So before we jump into the main four, I want to make note of some special mentions here. All of these on this list, I have actually met someone who is a digital nomad doing that, or I have done it myself. So on this list, I have teaching or translating language, accounting, audio, whether that be engineering or being a voice talent, customer service, general virtual assistance, and a very special mention to AI and automation. Teaching or translating language usually takes the form of English as a foreign language teacher. Obviously, there are people out there who travel to physical locations, to physical classrooms to teach English as a foreign language, but there are also people that do that completely remotely via video call. That's a option there, especially if you're already teaching English as a foreign language at a physical school. Counting. It's not very common, but I have met a few accountants who work remotely, but it tends to be people that are higher up in the firm and are able to call the shots more than say a junior accountant. I'm not sure if I've actually met someone who is an audio engineer who works remotely, but I for myself, have actually done gigs on upwork where I've used my voice to make money. So voice talent is a mention here. Customer service, obviously, you can do customer service remotely, but it's only a special mention because I wouldn't say there's much career potential as a customer service rep. You'll be competing against other low paid freelancers or employees in some of the cheapest countries in the world. So not the best opportunity out there, but it does have a low barrier to entry. General virtual assistant. Unless you're an executive assistant who's really good at what they do, most of the people I know that are hiring virtual assistants are looking for value for money, and that's not a recipe to earn the most amount of money. Again, you're likely to be competing against people from the cheapest countries for not the most amount of money. And finally, AI and automation is a booming industry. It's a very special mention, but it's not yet seen whether this career path will have longevity. For this reason, I didn't put it in my list of the main four because we haven't really seen it play out over the long term. Right now, there is a huge opportunity to take advantage of AI while it's still new. But the way I see it, these tools will be mass adopted, and the clients that would previously hire you to do the work using these AI tools might end up using them themselves. So we're yet to see where AI and automation is to go in future, but right now it is a very good opportunity, so a very special mention to AI and automation. All right. With these out of the way, let's get into the four main categories. First, we've got coaching and consulting. Basically I've wrapped up any career here, where your role is mainly to meet with people via video call and provide assistance, advice, solutions, or in the case of remote sales, sell them on a particular product. Okay, so examples of this, you've got business coaches, therapists, relationship coaches, corporate consultants, basically any kind of coach or consultant. And then I've also thrown in remote sales because it's similar in the sense that you'll be on video calls all the time. The pros of this is there's usually a high hourly rate or in the case of remote sales, hopefully a high commission, but the cons are that it requires a lot of meetings. So you'll obviously have to be working on a certain time zone, which may or may not work, depending on which countries you want to travel to. I have a friend here in Bali, who's been taking sales calls, either super early in the morning like 5:00 A.M. Or super late at night like 10:00 P.M. So keep that in mind, it's not as time zone flexible this career. The second point, which was also affecting her was that she couldn't work from a coworking space because she had all these private calls to take. So even if they aren't super private, it might not be practical to work from a crowded coworking space where other people are around you when talking. So, for me, I love working from coworking spaces. It would annoy me if I had to do calls all the time and therefore couldn't use a co working space. But other people might be totally different. The final con is there's a high barrier to entry. If you're a coach or consultant, you really need to know your stuff. So usually it's not beginners in this field. So if you do happen to be a coach or a consultant already, this is a great career to transition into something completely remote. Other than that, let's move on to number three, digital design. So this covers all fields of design where the tools you use to design are on the computer. So Examples we've got here, web designer, app designer, graphic designer, UX designer, you could even throw in an architect here, basically anyone who uses software to design and doesn't actually have to physically be in a physical location, as we talked about earlier when we talked about the principles of remote work. The prose of this is it's only limited by your creative talent. So if you're particularly talented Or you have an eye for design, you have an advantage here, and you don't actually need to get a job in order to build experience. That's one of the best things about it. I have a friend named Havier, who just sends out unsolicited designs that he created himself to companies who he feels could have a better design. And if that company doesn't hire him themselves, a competitor might see it on Linked in, look at that design, think it's good, and hire him instead. That's the great thing about design. Anyone can just pick up the software and start designing straight away. You could design for Apple. You could design for any big company without actually being hired from them. Obviously, you're not going to get paid unless you're hired from them, but at least you can build a portfolio in this way. So in terms of barrier to entry, it's pretty low. But the cons it's becoming quite competitive. As the barrier to entry is low, as we mentioned, but also AI is automating a lot of the design work that could have been performed by a human. Now, obviously, we're yet to see how AI is going to transform the design industry. I'm sure it's not going to wipe out the entire design industry. For simple things like creating a logo or even a basic web design or mock up, people are increasingly using AI for that. So it might be a little bit harder to stand out and command high rates when many clients or companies are starting to use AI. But it's still a great career at this point. The third category I hear counting down from four in this list of four best careers is digital marketing. Honestly, as digital media becomes the primary marketing channel, most marketing work is by now considered digital by default. So there are so many examples of professions within digital marketing. You could be a digital marketing generalist, but you could be specialized in copywriting, which is basically sales via text. In the industry, sales text is known as copy, and this is basically any text on a website or e mail or any other location online. The text is designed to sell something. So this can be a very profitable skill set to have if you're good at it. Other examples here are e mail marketing. You could be an expert at the tools that people use to market through e mail. You could be very good at designing sequences to sell products. There is a lot just to e mail marketing by itself. Then you've got performance marketing, which is basically running ads. So that is also a profession that has a lot of upside potential. Then you have these three acronyms. The first one CRO stands for conversion rate optimization. Basically, CRO experts take a page and optimize it to increase conversions. And a conversion in this context means when the user takes the action that the person who created the page wants them to take. So in the case of, like, let's say, a product page on an e commerce website, how many people are clicking Add to Cart and checking out with that product. That percentage is the conversion rate. A person who works in CRO is optimizing that conversion rate so that that company can make more sales. Then you've got SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. This is basically the field of marketing where you're trying to get your website to show up higher in search results. So if you were selling height increasing shoes, for instance, then you would want Google to show your website at the top of the listings when somebody is searching for height increasing shoes. Makes sense, right? You'll get more traffic to your website, and therefore make more sales. Then finally, SMM stands for social media marketing, which I think you can kind of understand by the name is any marketing that is performed by creating content on social media and using social platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to make money for a business. Okay? So the prose of this is it's limited only by your ability to deliver results for the companies you work for. With a lot of these digital marketing professions, you can show a clear track record where you have increased revenue for your clients or previous employers. So in the case of CRO or performance marketing, you could use case studies to show where you have used ads. Or conversion rate optimization tactics in order to increase sales. And you can show that information with specific data, which is one of the benefits of digital marketing compared to other traditional forms of marketing. And secondly, it's probably the best skill to transfer into starting your own online business. So if you do wanted to go and be an entrepreneur later, Marketing and sales is the core of any business. So you'll be learning skills that will definitely help you with creating your own company in future. Now, the con of digital marketing is that it's hard to get jobs or build a resume without any real world experience. Like I mentioned, you have to show case studies, you have to show experience of you actually doing well with digital marketing in the past. Wise, who is going to hire you, who is going to trust you to do the work for them and their websites if you have no track record. Unlike digital design and the final field, which will cover in the next slide, it's a bit harder to build a portfolio and to build experience without getting a job first. And I'd say that's the biggest con. But if you're good at marketing, you have somebody that takes a chance on you, or you can market your own product and show the results from that, then you can use that to start your career in digital marketing. Okay, which brings me to the last profession and number one on my list, web and app development. So this is basically any field where you write code to build custom solutions. All right. So, some examples of this are all the different types of web developers, front end, web developer, back end, web developer, full stack, web developer, which is a combination of front end and back end and any other kind of software developer, which is quite broad, but basically anytime you write software or you build websites, you're in this category. The pros of this is that it's simple to learn. Note that I'm not saying it's easy to learn because there's a lot to learn here, but it's simple to learn. If you want to program a button to open up a pop up, that's a pretty simple concept. Learning the code to create it is something you'll have to learn, but it's a simple process in order to learn it. That's what I mean by saying it's simple to learn. Another pro is that like design, you don't need a job to build experience. You can build your own personal web at project straightaway to build a portfolio. You could build and launch your own websites, whether that be e commerce stores or any other kind of websites or web apps that you want to get into professionally, you can just build that without having someone to hire you necessarily. It's remote by nature. I've been working in this field for almost ten years now, and even back then, when I started, all the tools that we were using were in the cloud, all the communication was in the cloud. It's just remote by its very nature. Another pro is that it's self paced and low client facing. What I mean by that is if a client tells you to go off and build a certain page or build a certain website, as long as the requirements are clear, don't have to do it on any particular time zone. You could do it in ten blocks of 1 hour. You could do it in one block of 10 hours. It's up to you how you do it. And that goes hand in hand with the low client facing. So typically, I only have to take about two maximum three meetings a week as a web developer. Most of the communication can be done via e mail or on messaging apps like Slack. I don't have to be taking calls all day or having face time with my clients on a regular basis. It's a field that can be done sort of in the background. I guess that could be a con as well if you like to have meetings all day long. For those of us who don't want to be caught in meetings all day, it's actually kind of nice that the meetings are minimal with this career. And also, it's agile. And the reason why I say that this is a pro is because I feel like people that are in this field are going to be most adaptable to AI and the changes that AI bring to the entire knowledge work industry. And possibly even not knowledge workers, I mean, we've got self driving cars coming out as well. So AI is going to disrupt a lot of professions, and I feel like because this field is so agile by its very nature, the developers are the ones who are going to adapt the easiest to AI and start using it in their workflows. And this is the case for me, I've started using AI as much as possible and learning how to use it. I don't see it as a threat. I see it as a tool to do my job more efficiently and work on higher level problems. Now, in terms of cons, I can't necessarily think of many cons when it comes to employment because the people that are employing you know that this is a valuable skill, and they're just going to look at proof of your technical skills, which if you are actually skilled at web development, which you can learn and build projects without being hired, then it's going to be quite easy to communicate that within your job search, and it should be pretty straightforward to getting hired. At least that's been my experience taking the few jobs that I have taken as a web developer. But when freelancing, and this is something I know all too well as somebody who freelancers, it's not directly tied to revenue. And this makes it a bit harder to sell as a service as a freelancer. As opposed to the category we saw before, digital marketing, where you can show case studies of where you increase revenue. If you can say to a client, I increase the conversion rate of this client in a similar industry by 200%. I can do the same for you. This is going to increase your revenue by X thousands of dollars. Then it's easier to sell your services because the client can see the direct ROY. This is a little bit trickier with web development, because it's not directly tied to revenue. You can't as easily communicate ROY on what you're building. And the other thing is on the cons here is because it's a field that not many businesses really understand, that can also be a bit of an issue when you're selling your services because there can sometimes be a mismatch between what you know needs to be done for a website and what the client understands needs to be done. Whereas perhaps the other fields are a little bit more easy to understand on the surface. Web and app development is more behind the scene sort of techy field. Therefore, if you're dealing with someone who isn't also skilled or knowledgeable in tech, sometimes there is a communication disconnect here. That all being said, this is a field that I work in personally, and to give you some insight, I chose this career path because number one, I was genuinely interested in coding. I think that is important. But number two, I realize it's simply the most remote friendly career given that it's remote by default. What I mean by that is even if you work in an office with your co workers, you will still use Cloud tools to push your code and communicate with a team. There's actually no physical face time required in this field. Any meetings required can be on video call, and you can share your screen easily through the Internet. So keeping this all in mind, I want you to take everything you've written down about yourself and your career girls and attempt to line them up with one of these career paths. For some of you, these four paths might not make sense, and that's okay. But from my experience, the digital nomads I meet around the world typically fall into these four categories. If you're interested in coding specifically, stay tuned until the next video, where I share my recommended resources for learning more about that field specifically. 7. Conclusion: Thank you guys for joining me on this short skill share class to help you determine your digital Nomag career path, as mentioned at the start of the class, if you'd like to share your quiz results with the class, you can do so in the class project section. And if you'd like to learn about my digital Nomag career path of web development, I've put together a free beginners guide to web development on my website. Just head to chris thefreelncer.com slash beginner to sign up. While I can't speak in depth about the other career paths, I now know that going down the web developer path for me was definitely the correct choice, especially when I determine my specialization within it by combining my knowledge with a particular platform like Shopify. Do have some classes here on skillshare.com. If you'd like to dip your toes into my specialization of Shopify theme development. Otherwise, the best place to learn about Shopify web development is on my website shop fmveloper.com. All right, guys, that's all for today's class. If you enjoyed the class, please leave a positive review, and I'll see you on the next one.