Don’t have any remote positions in your past? Consider including any major projects that you worked on entirely remotely, whether they were stand-alone gigs or as a part of your in-office nine-to-five.
If you want to highlight your versatility, consider creating a two sections in your resume; One for your in-office and one for your remote work. This might prove the best solution for anyone searching for a hybrid position.
Highlight Your Remote-Friendly Skillset
This is the biggest way you can prove your Wi-Fi-powered chops to your potential employers. Living an entirely remote work life takes a certain type of person with a certain set of skills. You just have to prove that you have those skills.
Your resume can show off these skills within the descriptive section of each of your entries for previous jobs. You’ll also want to highlight them in job interviews when you get there. Here are the skills that remote-friendly workplaces will be looking for.
Independence and self-motivation
The biggest skill needed for remote work is the ability to be a self-starter. You won’t have a team around the office to keep you in the swing of things, so you’ll need to be the sort of person who can sit down and lock in.
Highlight any projects that you took the lead on, or any major projects that you owned from start to finish. Did you come up with any ideas that panned out and helped the entire team? Make sure they’re mentioned.
These examples can be remote, but don’t have to be — any independent projects that you accomplished will prove that you have the mindset for remote work, even if they weren’t remote themselves.
Good communicator
Your independence won’t do much good if you can’t work with a team, however. When you’re working remotely, communication becomes even more important for allowing your team members to know what you’re up to. There’s no water cooler to catch up with your team around, so you’ll have to Slack them constantly to stay in touch.
To show this skill on your resume, make sure to note any projects that required frequent communication. Bonus points if you can find a way to mention a time you were praised for communication specifically.
Problem solver
Working remotely means you can’t always flag someone down to ask a quick question. If time zones are a factor, you may even need to wait until the next day for a response to a simple problem. You can show off your problem-solving ability on your resume by highlighting both the problem and the solution you came up with.
Project manager
In practice, self-motivation results in better project management. Find some examples from your past jobs that will prove you can handle the entire process, from ideation to cost and time estimations to addressing unforeseen challenges as they come up. You might not be able to fit all of that onto your resume, but you can briefly touch on it — you can always follow up during an interview.
Time tracker
Most remote jobs don’t come with timecards, thankfully, so you’ll be managing your own time. This is a key part of project management, and something that remote managers might be suspicious of. Fairly or not, many executives suspect that remote workers aren’t working a full day.
To address this, consider if there’s a simple way to note in your resume that you met all your deadlines or kept all your projects under budget.