COVID-19 has brought drastic changes in work culture and the learning pattern. The culture of telecommuting is rising in case of big organisations of the world who are successfully operating online. While India was gradually accepting the concept of work-from-home culture and flexible working hours, this lockdown has made organisations realise that employees can be equally, or in many cases more, productive when provided with the liberty of working remotely and with flexible working hours.
Regardless of their field, work culture of most of the organisations will change after everything normalises. Organisations might partially or wholly adopt the work-from-home culture, as it helps in cost-cutting, saving resources, and is environment-friendly. The demanded skill-set, hiring trends and work practices would also change accordingly.
However, not everyone has skills required to work from home, and acquiring those is not an easy task. Utilising this time to upskill and reskill would help you grow in your existing roles, or explore new opportunities with more dynamic and adaptive organisations that can guarantee job security during such difficult times.
Some of the most in-demand work-from-home skills, which can help in your career advancement post lockdown include:
Web Development
Every organisation operating online trades with its target customers through a website. During the lockdown, many ed-tech firms, game-makers, online grocery stores, online cleaning services providers and other home delivery services have flourished. Even local supermarket chains have now come online to ensure safe deliver essentials in their respective cities or localities.
The trend of choosing online services post lockdown would continue as people would avoid social gatherings. In such a situation, web development will offer great career opportunities as more organisations would want a website to operate.
Learning web development would help you master the art of developing, designing and managing a website for various companies while sitting at home. Through an online web development training, you can learn HTML and CSS to build well-structured web pages — Bootstrap for developing responsive web pages, SQL for writing queries and managing information, and PHP for performing operations and building functional logic.
With this skill, you can start sharing exciting inputs with your organisation’s existing web development team, find opportunities as a freelancer, build websites for different clients, or start your own online business from scratch.
Content Writing
Content writing involves ideating, planning, writing, editing and proofreading content for the web. Articles, blogs, homepage content, marketing campaign content and scripts for videos, radio or podcasts are broadly a few things content writers work on. This is one of the most in-demand skills, for which employers mostly hire freelancers and virtual interns.
Content attracts an organisation’s target audience to its website, which ultimately helps in increasing its sales and revenue. More companies will gradually start functioning online after the lockdown, leading to an increase in the requirement of professional content creators.
Enrolling in an online creative writing training would be the best way to begin your journey as a content writer. It will help you develop your observational skills and understand how to find ideas to write. You will also get to strengthen your command on fictional and non-fictional writing, screenplay, and advertising writing, and learn to create crisp, coherent and error-free content. Through content, you will then be able to start writing from home for any industry of your interest such as automobile, sports, manufacturing, education, healthcare and information technology. You can even start your own blog.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is an umbrella term comprising multiple internet marketing concepts. It is the art of marketing an organisation’s offerings through a blog, email, social media, or any digital platform available to connect with existing and potential customers. It involves pay per click, SEO, content marketing, social media campaigns, affiliate marketing, email marketing, inbound marketing, and so on. It is the easiest, most efficient, effective, and affordable way to reach your target audience, breaking all geographical boundaries.
Imagining a world without digital marketing is impossible for companies in today’s time, as they cannot sustain the cut-throat competition and increase their visibility in the market without it. The need for digital marketers is booming exceptionally, bringing great work-from-home opportunities for skilled professionals.
You could enrol yourself in an online digital marketing training and learn multiple concepts such as blogging and analytics, online advertising — search, display, and video, social media marketing, ORM and automation — and mobile marketing. After getting skilled in digital marketing, you can work from home in different roles such as digital marketing manager, social media executive/manager, PPC/SEM expert, email marketing manager, analytics manager, or CRM manager. You can also contribute to your existing organisation’s online marketing practices or start working as a remote freelancer for different companies.
Courtesy: Internshala Trainings (trainings.internshala.com) — an online training platform