How Young Gambians Can Find High-Quality Remote Working Opportunities Online

As I’m sure you know, finding work, in general, can be very stressful.

Finding that work online can be even more so.

There are probably a million articles out there right now which describe the ways that you can go about finding remote work online. Many of them even share tips on how to apply to the jobs, deliver the work and even how to communicate with potential hirers.

Unfortunately, a lot of the work that these articles describe, and the websites that host this work, have, over time, become very low quality. Directing readers to work that pays very low rates, for very hard work, while requiring you to compete with sometimes hundreds of other people just to get the jobs.

An impossible situation for most people to actually want to participate in.

So, given these circumstances, what ARE the opportunities that are available to the young, ambitious, tech-savvy Gambian today?

Are there still remote working opportunities out there that are realistic and worth pursuing?

The answer is YES.

The kind of work that’s worth getting

The first step to getting high-quality work online is to understand the kind of work that is actually worth getting. Most jobs that are posted online are either scams or just simply a waste of time.

According to a FlexJobs survey, over 80% of those looking for remote jobs online were very concerned about falling into a scammer’s trap.

So how do you avoid this?

By getting a better idea of who you’re working for.

WHO are you working for?

Because of the nature of the internet, more than 9 times out of 10, you will be interacting with a person or entity that you’ve never met in person before. As you might expect, this leads to a high potential for scams and poor, unethical work opportunities.

The first step towards avoiding this all-too-common trap, is to look for clear signals of trust, that will let you know that who or what you are going to be dealing with, will not be wasting your time.

Common signals of trust are:

• High-quality design – If the website you’re on, or the client profile you’re looking at looks like it was designed in the 1990’s, my advice would be to steer clear. Good Example of high-quality design: https://www.toptal.com/
• Very easy to see who is behind the work – If the website you’re on or the client profile you’re looking at seems to be ‘hiding something’, ie lack of contact info on their website, or a lack of a profile picture on their profile page. Take a minute and think before interacting further, you could be running into trouble. Good Example of a high trust website: https://dribbble.com/jobs
• Clear testimonials from other people – If other people have clearly interacted with the website or client that you’re wanting to deal with, and have had good experiences with them, then you can be pretty sure that you are likely to have the same. Testimonials can usually be found on either the website/profile in question, social media, etc. Good Example of a website (99Designs) with good testimonials: https://www.ddiy.co/review-of-99-designs/

How to become the kind of person who can get that work

Once you’ve established the fact that you will be working for a person or a business that is actually worth the time. The next step is in making sure that the person or business would actually want to also work with YOU.

You can do this by making sure that you consistently take the right actions, that will not only move you forward in terms of becoming the right kind of person for the jobs you want but also will likely land you the jobs quicker than you expected.

The consistent actions you need to take to get high-quality work online

• Spend at least 1 hour a day learning and practising the skills necessary to do the job you want to get well. This ensures that you’re getting better and better every day, even if you may not be getting the jobs at first.

• Find stories of people who have landed jobs similar to the one you are looking to land. Then model them as much as possible. Getting the work you want (or anything you want for that matter) is largely a case of simply getting yourself into the right alignment with that thing. In this case, modelling those who have been successful in getting the jobs you want can help you do that. You can find these stories via podcasts, comments on blogs, YouTube. Almost anywhere online that discussions about your job area are being had.

If you simply keep these tips in mind and execute on the daily actions outlined above, there is almost no way that you will not start to land high-quality work online, within a very short space of time.

These are tactics that I have followed myself. With very good results.

So go ahead, give them a try and begin your journey towards success in this new world of online work.

About the Author

This guest post was written by Tapha Ngum, founder of FullyRemote.co a site where he shares tips for people who would like to learn how to find high-quality remote working opportunities online and be able to work from anywhere in the world. He is also working on FunnelSchool.co