One thing that’s been proven through this pandemic is that the percentage of jobs that can be completed from home is rising fast and the demand from people on the market is also growing steadily. People are not only expecting, but proactively seeking jobs where they can work remotely, half of the people working from home will consider leaving their job when their company forces them to return to the office.
Based on a survey published by Owllabs, 50 percent of employees won't return to jobs that don’t offer remote work after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
According to Upwork, 41.8% of the American workforce works remotely now, 26.7% will still be working from home through 2021, 36.2 million Americans (22% of the workforce) will be working remotely by 2025. This is a staggering 87% increase from the number of remote workers prior to the pandemic! (Source: Flexjobs.com)
Even though many people want to work remotely in the future, not every job can be done remotely. Research carried out by two economists, Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman from the University of Chicago, shows that 37 percent of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home, with significant variation across cities and industries. (Source: How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?)
But one thing is clear, to retain top talent companies are going to have to offer flexible work arrangements going forward. Remote is here to stay.
What We Can Learn from LinkedIn Data
Currently, there are 170M+ people in the United States who have their profile on LinkedIn. If we take into account the employment-to-population ratio, also known as the “employment-population ratio” (a macroeconomic statistic that measures the civilian labor force currently employed against the total working-age population of a region, municipality, or country; Source: investopedia.com), we find out that 92% of the working-age population in US have a LinkedIn profile.
This data may not be accurate as if you run a search with the location “United States” on LinkedIn you will get 170M+ profiles as result. But if you add all US states into the location and you even add Puerto Rico and District of Columbia, you will have only 140M+, so 30M+ people missing from that search. This inaccuracy might be caused by people who didn’t add their state or city on their LinkedIn profile but only USA as a location. And if you make a sum of all the data I am showing in the table, you will get 127,640,000 LinkedIn profiles so there is 43M difference between what LinkedIn is showing during various searches.
Out of 170M+ people around 11M+ people are open to a new opportunity. And around 4.9M+ people from those 11M+ people are also open to a remote opportunity. That’s around 45% of all Americans on LinkedIn who are currently looking for a new opportunity, are open to or seeking only remote job opportunities.
In the table below you can see the approximate number of people who are on LinkedIn and added any of those states as their location to their LinkedIn profile. Only the District of Columbia is showing more LinkedIn users as this is because Washington, D.C. (officially known as the District of Columbia) is the capital of the United States and it is a federal district with many federal employees that are not living in that area but they are working there.
The column “People on LinkedIn” shows the percentage of all LinkedIn users in comparison with the population of that US state. The last column “People on LinkedIn EPR*”, shows how many people are on LinkedIn per the employment-to-population ratio.
Note:
- Data about population are from “Total Resident Population and Resident Population Age 18 Years and Older for the United States, Regions, States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico: July 1, 2020”
- The employment-to-population ratios in the United States in 2020, by state, are from Statista.com
- As LinkedIn is not showing exact numbers, all those numbers that I am using are rounded down.
How Many People in the US are Looking for a New Opportunity?
Below you can find a list of all LinkedIn users in the US divided per state and in the last column you can see how many of them are open to working remotely.
Will we be totally remote?
No.
What will work for the future is FLEXIBILITY. If companies want to keep their employees happy, they need to be FLEXIBLE! Employees have proven the are trustworthy and can be productive in a remote environment, and they want more. Companies who want to retain talent are going to have to come up with more flexible work arrangements, such as flexible hours or days, location,etc. Companies that get that will be the ones who will thrive in the future.
