How to Work Abroad and Remotely in 2021

COVID-19 halted our careers and disrupted our means to earn a living doing what we love as full-time travel content creators. We hoped that we would be able to resume our lives but with no vaccine in sight, we came to the conclusion that we might not be able to be full-time travel bloggers in the same way and would have to figure out other ways to work remotely.

Now you may be lucky and your current employment is allowing you to keep your job and work wherever you want remotely. However, if you’re at a stage where you need to reassess your career or just want a life change, try asking yourself:

• What is most important to you?
• What skills and experiences do you?

The most important thing to us was having the freedom of being able to work abroad to our own schedule with our dog always with us. Our skills and experiences range from photography, content creation, digital marketing, writing, and being native English speakers. Once you’ve narrowed down your own skillset and experiences, you can create a list of possible remote jobs that you could do online.

Take a look through our list of skills and remote work suggestions for ideas on how you can live abroad.

After working with a camera full-time for three years, photography obviously had to be listed as one of our skills, but how can you earn money through photography remotely and online?

We’ve started to do a lot more stock creation work for brands based around the world. We use our Instagram account as our portfolio to showcase our quality of work and the brands can then decide if they want to hire us for stock creation work.

We can also make money based on the work we’ve already done on platforms such as Shutterstock. This makes for great passive income for work that is just sitting in your external hard drives.

Another thing we’ve been doing for the last three years for ourselves is creating content on a daily basis, so how can we do it for others? Digital Agencies are busier than ever thanks to the pandemic as businesses of all descriptions are coming to terms with the changing landscape and trying to move everything online. They want their website redone and want it full of SEO rich content, visual images and lots of blog posts. All things that we have experience of doing both as corporate workers and as freelance entrepreneurs.

We all have different experiences and various skills, but how often do we forget or take for granted having the skill of being able to speak English? This highly desirable skill allows you to be able to work remotely or live abroad, both of which we like to do very much.

The prospect of teaching English online is an appealing revenue stream for us in these uncertain times. TEFL Ireland is actually based in our Irish hometown which was what piqued our interest in learning more about the potential of doing the TEFL course. The TEFL certificate is easy enough to pick up with just 120 hours required to get the qualification which will allow you to teach English online or in a classroom.

While we’re not looking for a career change and become full-time ESL teachers, we do want to be able to financially support ourselves in the short and long term while living abroad. Plenty of content creators teach English online so that they can continue to travel, so for us, considering doing the TEFL course and being able to teach English as a foreign language was a no-brainer.

Our discount code: agirlwhoblooms for the TEFL Institute of Ireland’s TEFL Course knocks about a third off of the current sale price for anyone interested in working remotely through teaching English online. There’s also a 30-hour Teaching English Online specialist course included in that discounted price, which is dedicated to teaching you everything you need to know about teaching English online. You can click here to sign up for the TEFL Course and use our discount code.

You can read our dedicated blog post to The Why and How to Teaching English Online in 2021 if you want to learn more about becoming a TEFL teacher.

Siobhan used to work as a Marketing Manager both abroad in Kuala Lumpur and back home in Ireland so has a wealth of marketing experience to offer. With more and more companies accepting remote working is the way of the foreseeable future, Siobhan is able to offer her skills and experience on a freelance consultancy basis in a marketing specialist capacity. This allows her to be able to work for anyone anywhere from any location in the world.

In his previous role as Content Manager, Joe used to write up the entire content for quarterly corporate magazines and write for other publications so one potential revenue stream that allows us to continue working remotely is writing for magazines and websites. Travel has become our specialism and our hook so that is the genre that we would be aiming for. Consider what your interests are and where your experiences lie and see if freelance writing is something you could do as a source of income.

You might also be able to land a job as a regular blogger. With more and more businesses looking to add blogs to their website, hiring you for a couple of blog posts a week would present a cheaper option for them compared to hiring someone in full-time.

A lot of travel bloggers and content creators have had to go back into full-time employment as there’s no end in sight of the COVID-19 pandemic and no-one can wait around forever to resume what was. Including us. Time stands still for no-man and by not evolving with the changing landscape you could easily get left behind. By accepting that we must adapt and change, we’re able to still live our dreams.

Investing in yourself is the advice that we want to pass to you. Whether that’s by learning how to use a certain type of software or picking up a TEFL Certificate, if you believe you can live how you want and put in the effort now, then you can turn 2020 into a stepping stone so you can spend 2021 working remotely wherever and however you want.