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So, you want to be a digital nomad, but you aren’t sure what kind of work you can do to support yourself while traveling?
The first thing to ask yourself is what skills and experience you have that you could exploit. If you are a developer, website designer, social media expert, or accountant, you will probably have no issues finding remote work either as a freelancer or with remote-first companies. Find the best websites for remote job listings here.
But what if you are at the start of your career or have limited transferable skills? Are there still jobs that you can do? Yes. While these are only a few options, below are six of the most accessible digital nomad friendly jobs for beginners.
Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant is more-or-less an administrative assistant job that you do remotely. These jobs can vary greatly in what they are called, and also in what is required of you.
You might find yourself a role as an admin assistant for a remote-first company that needs administrative assistance for their remote teams. You might find yourself booking virtual meetings, managing a business email and forwarding emails to relevant team members, maintaining the online filing system, and doing some basic accounts work. A job like this is likely to have set hours that you need to adhere to wherever you are in the world and whatever time zone you are in.
Alternatively, you might find yourself as a personal assistant to a roaming entrepreneur who needs you to research and book travel, format documents, and update presentations. These are often part-time or freelance roles that you can find on freelancer websites. While you might not have strict hours, depending on the employer, you may need to be highly responsive most of the time.
These types of jobs don’t usually require specific qualifications. While work experience in a similar field is valued, it is not always necessary. It is more important to show that you are highly organized, a good communicator, adaptable and a quick learner, reliable, and trustworthy with confidential information.
One Quora user shared that she started working as a virtual assistant when 19-years-old and still at university to make extra cash. She worked on a freelance basis finding jobs on Fiverr. After a while one client offered her a more substantive operations job, which she still does as a remote contractor.
Data Entry
Data entry has long been a role that digital nomads have turned to when just starting out or when they need a simple way to make extra money to make ends meet. Unfortunately, data entry work is drying up as AI gets better at completing these tasks. So, while it is an option for beginner digital nomads today, it probably won’t be in five years.
Data entry is a fairly broad job that involves transforming or cleaning data to make it more useful. It can include activities such as tagging photos with keywords and converting long-form text into spreadsheet-friendly text. You might also be looking for and removing duplicate entries in a spreadsheet, or checking if certain data, such as postcodes, are in the right format. Good knowledge of Excel and attention to detail are the standout sills that most hirers are looking for.
The best place to find data entry roles tends to be freelance websites and also specialist sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Click Worker, and Dion Data Solutions. Often, you’ll apply for a one-off task, and if they are happy with your work, they might call you back for recurring jobs. You can work when you want as long as you hit agreed deadlines.
Transcription
Many new digital nomads look at transcription as a potential job since it just requires a good ear and relatively swift typing skills. But the general consensus among most people who have done transcription work is that the pay is not good, so it is only really viable if you are living in a part of the world with a relatively low cost of living.
Generally speaking, you can expect to be paid anywhere between US$10-$60 per audio hour, so that is the length of the audio that you transcribe, not the amount of time that you spend. It can take several hours to transcribe one hour of audio. You generally need to listen at a slower pace, pause and rewind multiple times, and you will also need to proofread at the end. You can expect it to take four hours to transcribe a single hour of audio.
You can make more money if you can specialize in an in-demand field. Familiarity with technical terms and a general knowledge means accurate and faster transcriptions, that many companies are willing to pay for.
There is a lot of transcription work out there for those who want to do it. You will find opportunities on freelance websites, or you can join transcription companies for regular work. Among the top transcription companies are TranscribeMe, Daily Transcription, Casting Words, and GoTranscript.
Customer Support
All businesses require customer support staff, and as more businesses go remote first, there are lots of potential roles in this field for digital nomads. The thing to be aware of is that it usually comes with set hours, as you will probably be hired as part of a team that provides 24-hour or business-hours coverage. It is important to be aware of this commitment when planning travel and choosing time zones.
What customer support looks like depends on the kind of business. In general, you’ll need to develop a good knowledge of the business in general and then work with a database to find answers to questions or check on orders, accounts, or products for a customer.
While it might seem outdated, a lot of this still happens over the phone. However, increasingly you’ll be responding via some kind of chat or via email as most people are directed towards a chat as their first port of call.
Customer support can be a tough job as people who reach out usually have a problem that needs solving. If you can help them resolve their issue quickly and to their satisfaction, you’ve made someone’s day. If you can’t, it can be hard on both you and them.
One Redditor who is a digital nomad who works in customer service says that she has chosen to travel across the Americas since she works for a US company. This helps her synchronize time zones, which is impossible in Asia as it can mean a shift starting at 1 am. She also budgets extra for private accommodation as she needs a quiet space to answer calls.
Online Tutoring
Online tutoring is also an accessible job for many digital nomads. If you don’t have a qualification to teach anything else, native or fluent English speakers can often find work teaching English online. While there are professional qualifications for this, there are many opportunities out there that don’t need one. If you do need one, you can often qualify after completing an online course that costs around US$100. Internationally, there is a big demand for English tutors online, especially for students in China and Korea.
There are plenty of online English schools out there that will do the work of advertising and finding students for you. While you can choose how much you work and your hours of availability, once you start having students you will need to be pretty regular as most will want classes at the same time each week.
How much you can earn depends on how much you are willing to put into it. One Quora user shared that they work on three different English teaching platforms giving around 30 hours of lessons per week, mostly one-on-one but also some group lessons. Some platforms set the price, and others work more like matchmaking services and let her set her own prices within the site’s guidelines. In addition to this, she spends around ten hours a week on class prep and making video content. Working this way, she can make around US$5,000 per month.
Freelance Writing
Last but not least is freelance writing, which usually involves writing commissioned content to be published on the web, but there are lots of other opportunities out there such as e-book writing, proofreading papers for English-as-a-second-language students, and more. When starting out, freelance websites are often the best place to find clients. They will usually hire you for a piece of work, and then come back to you with recurring work if they like what you do.
This is another job that you don’t need a qualification for, but you do need to be a good writer to get the most lucrative jobs. You need a good portfolio of high-quality work to share with clients to get new jobs. You also need to be able to work quickly to make it worth your while. The other essential skill is online research, as you will often be required to research topics online and then create unique content.
You can stand out from the crowd if you also have SEO skills, as most people are looking for writers who can produce content that will rank on search engines for certain terms. Another growing skill that is in demand is working with ChatGPT. Many sites now want authors to write good ChatGPT prompts to produce reasonable articles that can then be edited and published. From being a writer, you can also branch out into editing and publishing.
Freelance writing is another flexible job that lets you set your own hours as long as you meet agreed deadlines.
According to a Reddit thread on freelance writing as a digital nomad, while most enjoy the flexibility and freedom, they warn to prepare for a hard slog at the beginning as you find clients and build a portfolio.
How to Succeed?
While these are some of the easiest jobs to get into as a digital nomad, it does not mean that they are easy jobs. If you want to do the bare minimum, you can’t expect to have a great deal of success. As with most things in life, you tend to get out what you put in. The more you put into developing your skills, making contacts, and building your portfolio, the greater potential you have to earn as a beginner digital nomad.
