To ask what all these work from home jobs involve?

[MissCharlotteBartlett]

I'm reading about people who've "worked from home for years"
And people who have started working from home during COVID and are hoping to continue to do so from here on in.
What do you do? PreCOVID I never saw any WFH vacancies advertised. When DH requested to WFH sometimes his bosses had an attack of the vapours.

So what jobs can you do from your spare room?

I work for a large insurers Been WFM since March. Can do everything here that I do there as it's all computer based. All correspondence is email now so no need to use the printers
The courts have started accepting emails too which makes life easier.
A few teething issues with software but IT are improving this all the time.
Our company supplies laptops to thousands of staff very quickly. We've also improved a lot of things like payments so BACS is being rolled out more to save sending cheques.

Most of the solicitors deal with are at home too.
I see no reason for going back to the office. Customer facing staff are going in if they want to. I'm happy at my dining table.

HR Director

I write scientific software. I first wfh 89-91 when DH was seconded to the US - that was quite challenging with just a dial up modem for email. Fortunately the main office was an hours flight away so I could go there once a month, whereas in the U.K. I'd been in a small outpost with only a few colleagues anyway. Then when DH's job moved again in the U.K. in 1995 I again wfh and have done so ever since. The house was bought knowing I'd need decent office space and within 3 miles of a phone exchange (that mattered for early broadband!) The systems for remote working have got better and better, obviously. Everyone else is wfh at the moment, I can't really detect much difference except they don't need to worry about booking meeting rooms or 'huddle rooms' any more as they used to have to do in the open plan office.

i think that Covid has pushed lots of people into WFH that woudl not have considered it, or that would not have been allowed to by their company.
We have also now the software etc avalable that means lots of things that ld have been hard 5 years ago, is not hard now.

I WFH, I do a lot of planning and preparation from home for work with families. That can all be done from home as can meetings with others connected to the work I do.
But I cannot meet children and families at home, and zoom is not a repleacement. Nevertheless, large chunks of what I do can now be done from home.

I also teach. Teaching adults is fine via zoom, if less good than in person (group work and dynamics aren't as good)
Teaching kids 1:2:1 via zoom is not great. I made it work, and would do it again if necessary but it was much harder to teach/convey what I wanted, an much harder to see what they are doing, and slower overall in the amount of stuff covered.

I’m a variant on a computer programmer. DH is a programmer.

And yes, I have a dedicated home office. We only considered homes where DH and I could both have separate dedicated office space.

Software Engineer here. I’ve been on mat leave all during Covid but worked remotely in the past.

My job mostly involves writing code and reading other people’s code so can be easily done from home. Zoom meetings were the norm for me.

@MissCharlotteBartlett

I'm reading about people who've "worked from home for years" And people who have started working from home during COVID and are hoping to continue to do so from here on in. What do you do? PreCOVID I never saw any WFH vacancies advertised. When DH requested to WFH sometimes his bosses had an attack of the vapours.

So what jobs can you do from your spare room?

Many will say home based, with some travel. I'm a consultant/advisor. There are many different roles out there. It's just a case of looking for them.

Re the I never saw any WFH vacancies advertised

I was already in my job, I was allowed to wfh because it was that or lose me. I suspect this may apply to others who've wfh for a long time - companies wise enough to be flexible in order to retain skilled employees.

I'm an assistant management accountant for a big Russell group University. Almost all of our professional services support staff inc payroll and accounts payable have been WFH since 20th March so roughly 3000 of us.

Software engineer

Editing a scientific journal - mainly Bioinformatics.

HSE

90% of it can be done from home

I manage health and social care services. At the start and peak I was based in a hospital- very mucb all hands on deck. Now that services are getting back up and running I'm working mostly from home, with some time spent with clinical teams (a day or 2 a week)

@burritofan

Digital content editing and SEO; head in a laptop all day and no need to be in an office at all. If anything I work harder and better at home without open-plan office distractions. I do have a dedicated space for it though, as does DP (a separate one), who’s a data analyst. We’d both happily EFH full time forever and due to certain specialisms/job quirks, neither of our roles could be outsourced to India despite all the dire warnings. Annoyingly bought a house in London at the tail-end of last year to shorten our commute. Whoops.

Do you have a degree in that or how does one train in that?

I work in medicine licensing. It’s an office job. I got approval to transfer to full time home working 12 years ago (I was one of the first in the company). Since then I’ve applied for jobs I want without worrying about whether they say home based. I just make it clear that I’m applying to do the job as a homebased job. I’ve never had an issue. I’m not intending to ever go back to office based.

Without being too specific, I work on projects, so my time is spent either agreeing plans and designs in meetings and workshops, or producing documents to explain plans and designs, or reviewing other people’s documents. Probably evens out at about half my time being in meetings, but even before the pandemic this was almost always conference calls because people were at different offices around the country and travel budgets were tight.
Ime the ability to wfh is as much about the attitude of the boss as about whether you can actually work effectively. I used to have a boss who allowed people who lived a long way away to wfh as often as they wanted, and people who lived nearby not at all. Which is, imo, deeply unreasonable.

I'm a software developer, worked from home for years now. Last two companies everyone has been fully remote, but previously its been a mixture of people remote like me and those in an office.

Compliance manager at a bank, all work is PC based, stakeholders all over the country and world so even pr3 covid I probably had about 10 face to face meetings in 2 years, all over weber anyway.

Post covid going to hybrid model - 2 days office and 3 days at home. Keeping some in office for the collaboration etc that you get in the office. But I was able to wfh before covid so have been doing a day or 2.at home each week anyway.

I work for a government agency, prior to the pandemic I worked one day at home but from the sounds of things it will be more like one day in the office when we eventually return.

Science writer/researcher/editor here. Have worked from home since 2000.

A friends DD is WFH for a London Borough Council from up here in Newcastle upon Tyne. She moved down there around 4 yrs ago and was paying extortionate rent for a single room in shared accommodation (compared to same up here) She was "sent" home from work March last year and has been told she doesn't need to go back she can continue WFH up here indefinitely.

Sales- WFH for 20 years

I am a civil servant and so have mainly office based role so WFH mainly but sometimes do site visits, meeting and conferences face to face. So emails, writing reports, reviewing documents, record keeping, data collection and meetings via zoom and correspondence all can be done from home.

@Puffthemagicfanjo

I’m a software engineer. The vast majority of my job and those of almost everyone I work with can be done from home. We have gone from everyone being based in the office, to everyone working entirely at home, to being mostly at home with office space available to use when needed. It will probably continue as it is for the foreseeable future, and the change to at least partial home-working will almost certainly be permanent.

Exactly the same, except that I'm a designer (the kind that works with software engineers)

DH is a software developer and has worked remotely for years. Their company is not going back post-Covid -- there's a hot desking situation for those who want it.

I've WFH for approximately 10 years. I started as a freelance writer, moved to editing, expanded into full digital marketing, and now run a marketing department (on a hybrid schedule to accommodate the DC.)

Parts of what I do are similar to burritofan and it does require both a degree and specialised training; I've taken mine through the Chartered Institute of Marketing.