Are Work From Home Jobs Here to Stay? How to Secure a Long Term Work From Home Position in 2025

The last few years have seen a real boom in remote working opportunities but now it seems as though that time may be coming to an end.

While remote/hybrid working is certainly here to stay in some form, many companies are now choosing to limit or end their remote working policies, making it even harder for new employees to step into remote roles.

That’s not to say all hope is lost for those who love to work from home. Flexible remote working jobs do still exist and with the right steps, anyone can secure one.

In this deep dive article, we’ll not only be talking about how to find a remote job but also exploring the pros and cons of remote work as well as where to find online career opportunities.

Finding The Industry

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. Some jobs are simply better suited to remote work than others, and they always will be.

For example, while it might technically be possible to work an IT job remotely for the most part, sooner or later somebody will have to interact with the hardware. If IT staff are working on site, then fixing the problem might take seconds. If they’re working remotely then hardware issues can pile up, taking longer and longer to get fixed.

On the other hand, some jobs are perfect for WFH (work from home). Support hotlines often find it far cheaper to let their staff work remotely than pay for the costs of running an office.

This wasn’t nearly as possible twenty years ago when the average person didn’t have access to both a smartphone and a computer. In 2025, even if a company has to provide their staff with phones, running a support line remotes is still overwhelmingly cheaper for many, many services.

All of this to say that if you want a remote job you need to be looking for the right kind of role in the right kind of industry. Or, to put it another way, if you can’t find remote jobs and that’s what really matters to you, then it may be time to consider a change of career path.

Picking The Company

But it’s not just the industry that affects your chances of finding a remote role. It’s also the type of company you work for.

Let’s say you’re applying to work for a large, high street retail chain. You’re going to be their new advertising intern, in charge of writing all the copy for their social media.

Now, this is a role that, practically speaking, could be worked remotely. All you need to write copy is access to a computer and an internet connection. If you need to talk to your coworkers, services like Slack and Teams are more than capable of facilitating that communication.

And yet, the chances are very low that this kind of company will allow you to work fully remotely. Why is that?

As a high street retailer, this company will almost certainly have an HQ. In fact, they would seriously struggle not to. If they’re already running an in-person HQ, then suddenly the benefits of letting you go remote look a lot less appealing. After all, it’s not like it’ll save them any money.

Furthermore, there are costs to having your staff be remote. There’s less of an office atmosphere, less teambuilding, and less direct oversight.

Put simply, if a company cannot go fully remote then they’re far less likely to pick and choose.

Of course, the counter side to this is that there’s one group of companies that thrive on being fully remote and are often willing to pay good money for the right candidates. Those companies are startups.

Why Startups Love Remote Work

The best remote career opportunities almost always come from startup companies, particularly those in the tech/software as a service spaces.

This is because startups – at least those in a position to be hiring – will often have venture capital funding behind them. In practice this means that they’ve got cash to spend and a time limit to spend it in.

Investors like to see returns on their investments as soon as possible. When they do, they tend to invest even more money, giving the company more room to grow. As such, companies are often willing to pay a lot more money than usual to ensure that they get first rate employees.

Even if you’re not the most experienced candidate in the world, it’s still worth applying to these jobs if you have the skills because although they do often pay well, they tend not to appeal to people with lots of experience.

The more experienced a candidate the more likely they are to have a family/mortgage. People in those positions tend to prioritise job stability over a high salary and, unfortunately, startups are, by their nature, quite unstable.

On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of risk you can afford to take earlier in your career.

All told, if you’re looking to get good pay for remote work and don’t mind a little instability, then startups are the perfect companies to apply for.

Is Remote Work Worth The Hype?

Of course, for all that we talk about how to get a WFH job, it’s worth discussing whether they’re really all they’re cracked up to be.

For a start, as we mentioned earlier, most ‘work from home’ roles are, in fact, some form of hybrid working, requiring you to go into the office at least one or two days a week if not more. This is a problem because it means you can’t live wherever you like, which is widely considered to be one of the major benefits of working from home.

As for the experience of working from home, this can vary a lot from person to person. Some people really enjoy the peace and relaxation of being in their own space. Others appreciate the convenience of not having to commute – this can be particularly true for people with physical disabilities, opening professional doors that might otherwise have been closed for good.

That said, there are plenty of downsides and chief among them is the sheer isolation some people feel from working alone. For many, it can be vitally important to have strong connections with their coworkers as well as a sense that everybody is working towards a shared goal. Not only does this help to motivate them but it can form the backbone of a social life.

Removing that experience doesn’t just make the workplace less enjoyable. Depending on your lifestyle, that kind of regular isolation can have a serious effect on a person’s mental health.

And that’s just thinking from the perspective of the employee. For the company, there’s a serious danger of staff members becoming ‘siloed’.

Without the encouragement to communicate that comes from sharing a workspace, it’s very easy for people to work on their separate tasks without consulting one another. This can lead to problems that take months and even years to diagnose, costing the company serious money in the long run.

With all that in mind, it’s impossible to deny the benefits of remote work for both employee and employer. Ultimately, it’s always a trade off between the pros and cons and how much any of these factors matters depends so much on the individual, their psychology, and their circumstances. What’s really important is that you find the job that’s right for you. 

Persuading Your Employer to Let You Go Remote

If you already have an employer, then it’s seriously worth considering asking to go remote, especially if you’re thinking of leaving your current job anyway.

People often underestimate just how willing employers can be to make changes to their usual working practises if it means retaining a trained, experienced, and proven member of staff. When it comes to remote work, the shift will often cost the company nothing at all, while losing you could be quite expensive in lost hours of productivity.

This is particularly true for those who are considering retirement. If you’ve worked with a company for over a decade – especially if you’ve been working in more or less one role/type of role – then your understanding of the nuances of that company will be deeply invaluable.

In the software industry, for example, this is now becoming a real dilemma. As the people who built systems retire, legacy systems become harder and harder to fix and update. People with knowledge of those systems are seriously valuable and can earn a lot of money if they’re willing to stick it out another handful of years.

Of course, it’s important to note that every employer is different and how you speak to them will depend a lot on your relationship with your boss. All the same, if you make it clear that work from home is the difference between losing you and keeping you, then they may be far more amenable than you expect.

The Future of Work From Home

It’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic first forced us all out of the office, but even without the pandemic, it’s fair to say that work from home was coming sooner or later.

Right now, it may look as though remote careers were a brief trend that came and went, but the truth is that we’re on the downward slope of a boom the pandemic kicked off.

Although the trend doesn’t seem to be going that way right now, it’s still quite possible that, twenty years from now, remote work will be the norm. At this point in time, we just don’t know.

What we can be fairly confident of, however, is that online career opportunities certainly aren’t going to disappear overnight. For all the potential downsides, there are countless benefits that will always appeal to forward thinking, progressively minded companies.

Five years feels like a long time but on the scale of even one person’s career, let alone a whole company, it’s not that long. 

Even by a conservative estimate, it’ll be another decade or two at least before a clear picture really starts to emerge about how remote working affects a company’s profit in the long run. Until then, the remote job market will continue to fluctuate as companies search for the safest option.

Understanding Your Remote Career Options

Lastly, we’d like to wrap up with just a quick list of some of the most popular work from home jobs that you can still get in 2025:

• Content Writer
• Graphic Designer
• SEO Consultant
• Software Engineer
• Social Media Manager
• Mentor
• Personal Assistant
• Tech Support
• Project Manager
• Video Editor

But, of course, those are just a handful of the incredible and interesting remote job options that are ready and waiting for you.

When all’s said and done, your dream is to work a remote job, then there’s nothing stopping you. Now’s the time to start applying and find the role that’s the perfect fit.

Or, if you’ve got experience that you think others could benefit from, why not become a mentor with Career Navig8r. Setup is quick and easy. No boss, no middlemen, just you, your skills, and a mentor who’s ready to learn.