Top jobs for Digital Nomads

When it comes to picking a job for Digital Nomads, the possibilities are endless! Even though this is great when it comes to options, it can be daunting when it comes to deciding which job or career path to choose. For this article, I have decided to not just blurb out a list of jobs, but I’ve grouped them into 3 main categories:

NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED
Medium level experience required
Proven experience, industry level certifications required

Before we get started, if you are interested in a very long list of NON-digital nomad jobs, check out this article.

Now let’s get started!

NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

Content Writer

The term “Content Writer” is perhaps the broadest term of all the paid writing categories, but due to the rise of the other subcategories -discussed below- this category has become a bit clearer through the years. A content writer nowadays would be thought of as a writer that writes to people’s true personal interests. They would perhaps have areas specific topics such as romance, technology, dogs, cars, space, cooking, and as far as the list can go…the topics of course are endless. For this group of writers. Their tone, voice, and style are very important as they speak to the audience’s interests and emotions. Online magazines, newspapers, and blogs would be the first in line to snatch the few good writers out there. Perhaps you are the one they are looking for just now.

Copywriter

As a copywriter you will most likely be tasked with writing articles and blog posts which promote services or products. You will have a knack for drawing the reader’s interest into making a purchase, acquiring a subscription, or signing up to a newsletter. It sounds easy enough, but it can be trickier than one would think. How do you promote a reader into buying ostrich burgers? Enticing website visitors to subscribe to your client’s paragliding course? Or reeling them into switching mobile phone providers? This is a very crowded market due to its accessibility, so you have to bring your A game to find your place here.

Freelance Writer

As a freelance writer you won’t usually need to come up with a topic list. Let’s dive right into an example. This week you will receive a series of assignments to be turned in by next Monday @ 15:00. Your assignments for are to write 500 word articles on the following topics:

Off season Property Management in Greece
How will NFTs affect the digital rights market?
Best dog breeds for highly allergic people
How to start up a restaurant in Buenos Aires

If this sounds better than working in a 9 to 5 office, then perhaps this is the career move for you!

Proofreader

Proofreaders are perhaps the most unheralded and lesser known members of the professional writing community, but they are an essential piece of the puzzle. Proofreaders are like the Quality Assurance department in a big company. They make sure all the commas are in the right place, the grammar is perfect, and ensure the overall composition of the piece is in balance. Many of the proofreaders I know have backgrounds in teaching, clerical and administrative professions, and accountants. Of course, anyone with up to par written language skills can explore this career path. There are many proofreading agencies that hire entry level proofreaders for smaller content projects.

Customer Service Agent, Customer Support

You know those chat screens that pop up when you click help on a website? These are the folks behind those screens…if you can get past the chatbots. Customer service agents are trained by the hiring organization, and will teach you from A to Z how their product or service works and how you can service their customer base. In today’s online world, this is as close as customers will get to meeting the “face of company”, so you will serve a very important role in the organization. Given how this business works, and the fact that all your “on the clock” interactions can be easily monitored, this is a job where you can climb up the ladder quite quickly if you have that customer service touch.

Data Entry

You would think that in this day and age we would already have a python script that could take care of all the data entry work backlogged in this world. But no. So they need you. Data nowadays comes in so many different formats and requires so many different processing methods that it’s often (way way) cheaper for companies to use a person to do this than a system. So what does data entry work entail? These are some of the most common tasks when it comes to data entry:

Entering customer purchase orders in the system
Updating and maintaining spreadsheets
Entering customer profiles and data into ERP systems
Prepare data for reporting
Gathering and administering invoices, statements
Scanning documents for specific data points
Monitor and correct data entry errors
Entering and updating database information
Managing database backups
Storing and managing hard copy data

If you are looking to quickly get into the online job market, this can be an excellent direction to start in.

Medium Level Experience Required

Technical Support

Technical support would be the next level from vanilla Customer Support. Often known as 2nd line support, you will be handling the cases 1st or front line support could not resolve. This will require you to have a deeper understanding of the system and business flows. You will very likely be interfacing with IT devops teams, system engineers, and developers. As you are the bridge between the customer and the IT side of your company, you will be required to speak their language in order to explain the issue with precision. You will also be asked to carry out medium level system troubleshooting functions and medium level testing to ensure the customer’s issue has been straightened out. Even though this position might not seem that glamorous, it is for the managers of these departments. Support requests customer satisfaction is directly tied into their KPIs (as in how they are measured by their managers) so you can rest assured, you are extremely valuable to them.

Translations

As a translator you will usually be translating texts into your native language(s). These jobs will come in 4 main flavors:

Long work translation, books, manuscripts
Guides and manuals
Commercial work, product and promotional page translation
Official documentation, certificates, diplomas

For the first 3 categories you can start as soon as today. For the latter you will very likely be required to obtain a translator’s official certificate depending on the country you are submitting these documents in.

Email Marketing Specialist

Email marketing specialists will have the uncanny ability to bring their recipients to their client’s site and/or to initiate their purchasing journey. For this profession, you will need to master 2 main disciplines:

Content writing
Technical email marketing tooling and platforms

For email marketers to stand up, they will need to write amazing newsletters and email campaigns that will attract their reader’s attention. You will also need to master the technical design tools of your trade as you will be making attractive email templates, headers, footers, and all the nice bits in between. Last but certainly not least, you will need to be very well versed on the email platforms that will carry on the distribution load of your campaign. Some of the most widely used platforms are:

MailChimp
Hubspot
MailJet
GetResponse.

SEO Specialist

SEO specialists have the key task of making sure their client’s website appears as high as possible on search engines’ results. Some of the tasks that you will be performing:

Report to the marketing director
XML Sitemap generation and implementation
Schema markup
Detailed and extensive keyword research
Discover ways to optimize existing website content
Propose new ways to optimize new and upcoming content
Participate in link building campaigns
Evaluate web traffic and analytics
Report on performance (clicks, conversions)

Even though this career path certainly requires that you acquire the relevant skills, there are a ton of resources out there to get you up and running in just a few weeks. If you are looking to formalize your resume or CV a bit more, you can obtain certifications even though these are not required to get started in this field.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) Specialist

Conversion rates optimization specialist is a profession best suited for those with high attention to detail. You will be responsible for increasing the level of engagement for your client’s website. This of course can be approached from countless angles, but for most jobs in this area you will be looking at what is called A/B testing. What this entails is basically splitting your client’s website into an A and B version and analyzing the results from your visitors.

Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist tasks examples:

Testing how website visitors respond to a yellow background versus a red one
How do users react to pop ups coming from the top versus coming from the bottom
How do subtle changes in the website’s layout affect the customer’s journey
Test different checkout flows to increase cross sales
Test how different cookie consent pop ups affect the behavior of the website visitors
Find the best page locations for ad and affiliate placement
Measure the engagement social media widgets and functionality have on the website

Popular tools of the trade for CRO include:

Optimizely
A/B Tasty
Crazy Egg
Zoho Pagesense

Trading Stocks, Crypto, and Forex

We could argue for weeks if this is a profession or not, and at the end of it we would come up with this conclusion: yes and no. Correct, this is the most annoying conclusion you can get to. Why is this? In my view, it’s like tennis. You can be a tennis pro, or you can be a Sunday doubles player. Same with trading. You can become a professional trader working at brokerage or a bank, or you can simply trade for yourself. If you happen to have a knack for this, and you can afford the risk of losing every single penny you put into this venture, then maybe this is something you could look into.

It would be beyond the scope of this article to go into what does it take to become a stock, crypto, and/or forex trader (all of them immense topics on their own), but here some of the basics:

Understanding of the financial markets or the asset classes you will trade in
Understand the drivers and risks of the assets you are trading
Have solid money management foundations and the discipline to trade responsibly
Technical knowledge of the trading platforms you will trade on, for example:
- Metatrader
- Tradestation
- cTrader
- NinjaTrader
Understanding of the technical indicators that apply to your asset class
Ability to develop a trading strategy
Understanding of modern algorithmic trading techniques
Understanding of trading robots or “bots”
Time to follow the news on a daily basis, and perform regular analysis on how your strategy is performing

Proven Experience, Industry Level Certifications Required

UI/UX Designer

As a UI/UX (User Experience / User Interface) designer you will be designing your client’s website’s face. This design will be what visitors see and experience when they first see the homepage. Not only the grand level design of the website, but also the buttons, menus, headers, footers, widgets, news feed frames, and all the visual components that make up the website. Even though your areas of expertise will be design, you will need to have the right people skills as you will be working with many different internal and external departments, such as front end developers, marketing teams, CRO specialists, as well as partners and affiliates.

Front End Developer

As we dive deeper into the list, we now cross the line into IT engineering careers. These jobs require solid proven experience and well rounded resumes. Expect several rounds of interviews and most likely a test (or series of) to measure your skills. You will be required to be proficient in at least a handful of these topics:

JavaScript
HTML
CSS
PHP
AngularJS
React
VueJS
JQuery

With a combination of these programming languages and frameworks, you will build website front ends based on the specifications you get from your Product Owner, Project Manager, or designer depending on how the organization operates. If you are starting from zero, you are looking at a steep learning curve. It will require a lot of commitment from your side to get yourself to the level where you can become attractive to an organization. Having said that, it is totally worth the sweat!

Front end developers are some of the most sought after talent in the industry, and there’s no signs of this slowing down. This career path will very likely bring you a steady flow of income for as long as you want to stay in it.

As with all technical positions listed here you will also require the necessary soft skills in order to work in groups, sometimes very very large groups with a myriad of different specialties. Getting familiar with Scrum, Agile, working methodologies might be a good idea if you want to make the ride as smooth as possible.

Back End Developer

Back end developers bear the brunt of keeping the engines running. When it comes to giving examples of back end work, things get a little bit tricky as this is such an immense landscape it is hard to come up with a comprehensive list. But to give you an idea, these are some of the most common back end developer tasks:

Developing transactional and payment systems
Develop applications to run on Kubernetes
Processing and storing records in a database system
SQL query development
Run back end scripts to generate front end code, such as HTML
Process incoming front end requests

These are some of the most common languages used for back end development work:

Python
PHP
SQL
Java
C/C++
NodeJS
JavaScript
Ruby
C#
Perl

Perhaps a nice tidbit to add when it comes to the back end developer career path, is that this is one of the areas where the biggest changes are set to come…for decades out. Just to mention a few, the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence are in their early stages. The most apt candidates to fill the demand these areas will generate will in big part come from the existing back end developer community. Working in an area that has a huge expansion horizon can have priceless advantages.

Cloud Engineer

If you haven’t noticed, the world is moving to the cloud. The need for cloud engineers is only growing and growing. This is not something projected to change in the coming generation. All these points are in parallel to the need for cloud engineers. It is only increasing, and opening more areas of specialization. Meaning the fact that the cloud exists is generating a series of new jobs inside it that didn’t exist even a year ago. This market is very dynamic and extremely competitive as diverse cloud vendors rush to introduce cutting edge features to attract more users. The biggest clouds in the space are:

Amazon’s AWS Cloud
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
IBM Cloud
SAP
Oracle
SalesForce

The possibilities for Cloud Engineers are as exciting as they come! You will be working with state of the art technologies, inside a growing and stable job market.

Full Stack Developer

The elite of the developer job market. These are the rare individuals that master both the front and the back end, so essentially a combination of the previous two professions. The value of these developers cannot be seen as purely 1 + 1 = 2. Full stack developers have the complete overview of the system, from the front to the back, and everything in between. Not only do they have the overview, but they would understand every nut and bolt in the system. This end to end knowledge is invaluable for an organization that relies primarily on their website as a source of income. If you can bring yourself to this level, you can guarantee yourself a grand and steady income until you choose to retire.