Today we seek to explore what binds remote work and remote education. 

Remote work is simply a model of work where employees and teams are majorly distributed, and they do not commute to a central place of work, like an office premises, every day. People can work out of their homes, co-working spaces or anywhere in the world.  

Remote education and learning, similarly, lean away from the traditional centralised classroom premises setup and teaching and learning primarily happen through technological tools and infrastructure. 

Practically

The key parallel of remote education and remote work is how both enable extraordinary worldwide collaboration. Simply put, one could work at any firm and learn from any school in the world.  But maybe this is more the similarity of outcome rather than of fundamentals.

At a simple practical level, remote work and remote learning are built on the same foundation of robust digital tools and require people to be tech-savvy. 

Cost savings is another important factor that is present in both remote education and remote work. Global Workplace Analytics, a research firm, found that if employees worked remotely even three days of the week, then companies could save up to $11,000 for each employee. For workers, the costs of commuting to the office every day are heavily slashed. For students opting for remote education, housing and travel costs are eliminated. 

Flexibility is something that remote work and remote education both bring with them. The ability to choose your hours and seamlessly integrate work and learning with life is a paramount advantage of these models. 

At the same time, since work and learning are just a few steps away from the computer at home, remote work and education may have blurred personal boundaries for people who value them. Detaching from emails, messages, results and agendas at the end of, say, a shift, session or class requires effort that just ‘exiting the premises’ did not. 

Fundamentally 

Let’s look at the fundamentals though.

Demand and supply always find a way to balance each other out and this stands true in the case of remote work and education as well. 

For a long time, there was a demand for access to special and higher education that did not require students to move out of their hometowns and cities. It came from the absence of means that students in smaller towns and cities struggled with.  

Devansh, 21, wasn’t able to pursue a course in Graphic Designing like his ‘rich cousin from Mumbai’ because his hometown Sultanpur didn’t have the opportunity. He began self-learning through YouTube but knew he needed a formal education in the subject to be eligible to work further. With the rise of edtech in India, Devansh saw how online courses became more streamlined, affordable and credible. He registered on one of the burgeoning online academies and even specialized in forms of Design he did not know existed until other students started discussing them.   

But Sultanpur is a small town. For students in Tier-II cities as well, getting a special course or higher degree from overseas meant moving out, paying for rent and lodging abroad and in general spending a lot of money. Remote education has helped thousands of them to attend, say, MBA classes online from international universities of their choice. Within the country and internationally.

The need for quality, higher education that isn’t too costly was directly met by remote education. 

Similarly, companies were spending large amounts of time, money and effort into finding people with special skills, training them and then assigning them projects. Most often, if the limited local talent pool did not yield any substantial results, firms would take on helping existing employees learn skills and perform extra tasks for additional remuneration. It was a lengthy process, and there was a demand for special skills that quickly harmonized with the tasks at hand. 

For instance, a SaaS firm in Gurgaon wanted to onboard a part-time developer for a six-month period, but qualified candidates for the job wanted to a full-time, permanent position. When the firm brought all operations online, and remote work began in full swing, it was easily able to find multiple qualified people for the same job. They eventually hired not only Vashisht from Nashik but also Rishabh, 24 from Singapore who was looking for a brief developer internship in his domain to assist and learn. 

The demand for special skills was supplied by remote work, which opened global talent pools for firms and companies to utilize and hire from. 

Economics, in the end, always attempts to balance demand and supply.

Remote work, at its core, is simple economics.

In the next blog, lets take a look at what separates remote work and remote education. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A senior banker from the complex global markets space, Mr. Nishant Shah has worked for more than two decades across Citibank, Standard Chartered and JPMorgan Chase before taking over as our Managing Partner. Passionate with word and pen about finance, technology, macroeconomics and future trends, he is a Chartered Accountant by education and the winner of various prestigious awards during his career, including the ‘India Awards for Excellence’.

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