Designers just want to work from home too
According to a recent report from Seek, “work from home” is now the most searched term on their website. This shows a huge mindset shift for job seekers, who traditionally searched mostly for job titles and locations. As suggested by the Sydney Morning Herald last week, this could mean people have abandoned the search for their dream job in place of something that just allows them to work from home.
While this may be the case for less specialist industries, how has the work-from-home phenomena changed the design job landscape?
Well, if job ads are anything to go by (and they usually are), companies seem to have embraced work from home design jobs just as eagerly as employees. Overall, The number of jobs advertised as ‘work from home’ is now 11 times higher than pre-pandemic levels. Design-related jobs are represented strongly in that mix.
Our recent survey of creative jobseekers found that 7 out of 10 listed ‘work from home options’ as an important factor when assessing design roles.
Work From Home Design Jobs
According to our own job ads data, employers are now open to everything from work from home graphic design jobs, through to remote content designer roles.
The range of organisations adapting to this trend is broad, including big tech giants like Atlasssian and Canva, through to the NSW government, who at the time of writing this, have at least five work-from-home graphic design roles available on DesignJobs.com.au.
Take a look at the current list of work from home design jobs available here.
Of course, a big factor in this new found flexibility is the tight job market which sees unemployment at a 50 year low of 3.4% in Australia. This has lead to stiff competition for workers and with it, higher salaries and more generous perks, as companies fight to attract and retain talent. With ‘Work from home’ now the top search term, its no wonder job ads offering location-flexibility have been rising steadily.
Sign-on Bonuses for Design Jobs
Another way employers have been increasingly trying to attract workers is through sign-on bonuses. The number of job ads mentioning sign-on bonuses is up nearly 2200% on pre-pandemic levels.
A sign-on bonus is a one-time payment that is given to new employees as an incentive to join a company. These bonuses can be extremely lucrative, and they often come with other perks, such as relocation assistance or extra vacation days. While sign-on bonuses used to be reserved for highly-skilled workers in sought-after fields, they are now being offered to a wider range of employees, including entry-level workers and those in less desirable industries. The increased use of sign-on bonuses is a direct result of the tight labor market, and it is likely that we will see even more of these bonuses in the future.
So, do designers just want to work from home? That’s hard to say definitively, but empirically, and based on job ads, things do seem to be heading in that direction.
What we can say is, with low unemployment and a shift of power to employees, there is certainly no shortage of employers willing to offer work from home design job options. It’s a good time to be looking for a job.
Cover image courtesy of Helena Lopes via Pexels.
