Industries with the Highest Share of Remote Jobs
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- Updated December 8, 2023 2 min read
Have you ever set your alarm clock to 5 minutes before starting your work? Then you probably worked from home at some point. And there are millions of people worldwide just like you.
But if you’re one of those people who have to commute to their workplace every day while hoping to work remotely someday, these stats will surely help you choose a profession that is most likely to offer telework to their employees.
In 2022, more than 10 percent of all American workers worked remotely, according to the BLS Occupational Requirements Survey. The poll considers only those jobs that offer permanent remote work. Therefore, it excludes temporary arrangements, such as those made in response to the COVID-19 epidemic.
More than half of computer and mathematical jobs were remote in 2022
The extent to which employees could work remotely varied by their occupational group. And it may not come as a surprise that computer and mathematical professions had the highest percentage of employees with the ability to work remotely in 2022 — 52.5 percent.
Different professions within the same occupational group have naturally different shares of telework available. And among computer jobs most likely to offer work from home, it was software developers (62.8 percent), computer network architects (62.4 percent), and computer programmers (59.9 percent) that topped the job list in 2021.
Software developers, indeed, belong to the fastest growing occupations with as many as 162,900 job openings on average projected each year over the next decade.
Legal occupations had the second largest share of people doing telework
Legal occupations were the second occupational category that, to a large extent (48.8 percent), gave its employees the option of working remotely.
Among legal jobs, 61.6 percent of lawyers had the ability to work from home in 2022. So, if you had the impression that lawyers appeared in court on a daily basis, it could come as a surprise to learn that the majority of them never do.
The tasks that lawyers conduct, such as document preparation, client engagement, and legal research, are often at least somewhat “teleworkable”. However, it certainly depends on the kind of law they’re practicing.
And what about the jobs that are least likely to telework?
As we may expect, healthcare practitioners and technical occupations had the lowest share of work-from-home ability in 2022. Work from home was made available to as few as 1.7 percent of healthcare employees.
At the end of the day, work from home is not for everybody. Let alone for those who often interact with the public, use machinery, or carry out other tasks that require them to be at the jobsite or supervised.
- Certified Professional Resume Writer
Julia is a professional writer, translator and graphic designer. She holds degrees in translation and interpretation, and has international work experience from a number of different countries in Europe as well as China and Panama. Julia formerly taught academic writing and as a graphic designer contributed to outlets such as The Business of Business. She has a passion for lifelong learning and good coffee.
