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Upwork: 22% of American Workforce Will Be Remote by 2025

Upwork, the world’s largest work marketplace, today released the results of its second 2020 Future Workforce Pulse Report, a survey that examines the hiring habits and sentiment of over 1,000 U.S. hiring managers. The findings reveal that by 2025, 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely, an 87% percent increase from pre-pandemic levels.

“Our research shows the long-lasting impact that remote work and COVID-19 are likely to have on how hiring managers think about their organizations,” says Upwork Chief Economist, Adam Ozimek. “As businesses adapt and learn from this remote work experiment, many are altering their long term plans to accommodate this way of working. On work marketplaces like Upwork, we can already see this shift underway with increased demand for remote professionals.”

The survey comes at a time when remote work is increasingly a mainstay of American professional life, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the sudden shift to remote work has been an adjustment, the survey finds hiring managers are seeing the positive benefits to a distributed workforce and plan to continue leveraging remote talent. For additional results visit the full survey page here and to view analysis by Upwork’s Chief Economist Adam Ozimek, read his report here.

Key findings reveal:

Additional findings include:

Despite the success of remote work, hiring managers continue to face resourcing issues: 

Some are already finding relief with independent professionals:

And more are beginning to unlock the potential of independent professionals as they become more comfortable with remote teams:

About Upwork’s Future Workforce Report

The report was conducted by independent research firm ClearlyRated. This is the fifth year the survey has been conducted. This report uses survey data to understand the impact of remote work in response to COVID-19. More than 1,000 U.S. hiring managers were surveyed through a third-party, independent online sample between October 21, 2020 and November 7, 2020. Overall margin of error of ±3.01% at 95% confidence level.

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