Yahoo Finance Top 10 industries still offering work from home
The number of job ads offering WFH is still at a high, despite a softer labour market.
Worried the days of work from home could be over? Well, one Aussie economist has some good news for you and has revealed exactly where you can still find WFH jobs.
New insights from SEEK found the portion of Australian job ads offering WFH remained at a high, despite a softer labour market.
The WFH rate reached a peak of 11 per cent of job ads on the platform in April 2023. This has now softened to 10 per cent in October, but it is still way above the pre-COVID level of 1.6 per cent and the levels seen during lockdowns.
“At 10 per cent, the WFH rate remains above the 9 per cent recorded in May 2022, when the Great Job Boom reached its peak,” SEEK senior economist Matt Cowgill said.
“Since May 2022, labour demand has cooled and the average number of applications per job ad has increased substantially, yet WFH has risen as a share of all job ads.
“This shows that the ability to work from home at least some of the time was not a perk that employers were only offering during the period of peak labour-market tightness. Even as the market is moving to a more normal balance between supply and demand, the proportion of job ads offering the ability to work from home has remained high.”
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Where are all the WFH jobs?
Here are the top 10 industries with the highest portion of WFH-friendly jobs:
Insurance and superannuation
Consulting and strategy
Information and communication technology
Call centre and customer service
Human resources and recruitment
Accounting
Legal
Banking and financial services
Design and architecture
Advertising, arts and media
WFH was most common in the bigger states, with NSW recording a 12.1 per cent WFH rate and Victoria 12 per cent. This was compared to 6.6 per cent in Western Australia.
Cowgill said most industries were either at, or very near, their highest level of WFH rates for jobs ads. For example, nearly half (45.2 per cent) of job ads in the finance and insurance sector in October indicated they could be done from home. This is much higher than the 3.8 per cent recorded in February 2020.
For industries seeing the WFH rate fall from their April peak, Cowgill said this drop was still “generally small”.
WFH worries
The WFH debate rages on, with some employers indicating they will start to pay staff less if they don’t come into the office.
A recent global survey by Herbert Smith Freehills found 37 per cent of Australian employers were planning to differentiate pay between remote and in-office staff in the next three to five years.
Meanwhile, major bank ANZ warned staff this week that their bonuses could be cut if they failed to come into the office as required. The bank joins Suncorp and Origin in linking bonuses to office attendance.
Some industry groups have also argued that WFH staff could find themselves on the chopping block, as more companies prepare to make redundancies over the next 12 months.
Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox told The Australian Financial Review it could be a case of “out of sight, out of mind”.
“As the labour market shifts, you’re going to see employers start to make some decisions around who to retain and the circumstances under which they retain [staff]. There is that [feeling that] if you don’t turn up, you’re not as close a member of the team,” Willox said.
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