Marie Hvidsten, Macine Lukach and Andrea Bowman from NDSU extension join Jodi Bruns to talk about the Master Remote Work Professional certificate course, a 1-month specialized training designed to equip workers with the tools and skills needed to work from home as a remote worker, freelancer, or entrepreneur.

Transcript
Jodi Bruns: Welcome to Thriving on the Prairie. A podcast exploring issues concerning families and communities that inspire North Dakota movers shakers and community difference makers to engage in lifelong learning. Hi. I'm Jodi Bruns, Leadership and Civic Engagement specialist with NDSU Extension.Today we're joined with three of my colleagues who I work with on a pretty regular basis. And the topic today we want to share with you is regarding our remote work certification program that we kicked off in August. So I'd like our other presenters here to introduce themselves. I'll start out with Marie.

Marie Hvidsten: Thanks. Jodi, good morning. I’m Marie Hvidsten and I'm the rural leadership specialist with NDSU Extension. And I've been working with the remote work course the past several months. And I'm really enjoying it and appreciate the opportunity to work with the other three from NDSU as a coach.

Jodi: Thanks Marie. Macine.

Macine Lukach: Thanks Jodi. I’m Macine Lukach. I'm a Program Coordinator for NDSU Extension in the area of leadership and community development. And I, like Jodi and Marie, I’ve been working with this program and have found it very beneficial and hope to see others benefit from it also.

Jodi: Thanks, Maxine and Andrea.

Andrea Bowman: I’m Andrea Bowman, and I also work for NDSU Extension in the area of Leadership and Civic Engagement as a program coordinator and I, too, have been working with this program since last spring, and I'm excited to bring it to the people of North Dakota.

Jodi: Thanks, everyone. So what brings us here today is not unlike many people, most Americans, many Americans, we found ourselves working remotely about mid-March and really thinking about what do we do next, what does this look like? And certainly, sometimes we have done this when weather has prohibited us from driving to our office or workplace, but all of a sudden we found ourselves working at our dining room tables at our home office and so forth. So, we were introduced to a program that Utah State University Extension had been offering on remote work. It's a certification program. So the four of us decided to take that in April. And we felt it was so beneficial that we needed to bring this to North Dakota. And so I'll start with Andrea, so you have done a little research on the data and you know who exactly was working from home and what that looked like. Could you just share some of that information with us?

Andrea: Yeah, so for most of us, remote work became really real in in March, probably in North Dakota here and going forward. But when we look back on remote work was actually growing already. And in that you flex jobs in globe Workplace Analytics they focus major upward trend on people working remotely. They've they've noticed that over the years. So in the US from 2016 to 2017 remote work grew 7.9%. If they look back at the last five years, it was a 44% increase, in the last 10 years a 91% increase. So definitely already trending up in the amount of people that were working remotely. Then when we look at when we get into the pandemic time and when everyone had to make the shift quite quickly; in May of 2020, 100 million Americans were working from home and in June, according to some research at Stanford, and one of their economists, Nicholas Bloom, has some interesting research on remote work. But in June on June 29, 42% of us were working from home. 33% were not working at all. And 26% mostly essential workers were working on site. That's kind of interesting to to look back and realize that remote work was already growing a lot before everyone was kind of thrown into it without a choice. So the exciting thing about this course is that there, there's huge potential for remote work going forward and organizations, allowing some flexible work environments. So we're excited to help people continue to work remotely, but also build those skills that they need, even if it….it was something that they didn't necessarily plan on doing right away.

Jodi: When you read those numbers I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised. You know, we kind of live in a bubble and we drive and get in our cars in the morning, we go to work and I just don't think that trend has necessarily hit us. Maybe it's the upper Midwest, or even just, you know, specifically to North Dakota. I also read once that in December, a year ago zoom had 10 million daily participants and then four months later, there were 300 million participants. And the other... zoom isn't the only platform. So I think that that is astounding how people have just, as we've said so many times, pivoted to to remote work. Marie, I wonder if if you could tell us about, so when we went and enrolled as students in a remote work course they really focused on three kinds of specific work: a freelance, an entrepreneur, or a virtual employee. Could you tell us a little bit about each of those or what the definition of each of those are?

Marie: Absolutely. So some of us as Andrea talked about probably were working remotely and so you had that opportunity to maybe do something a little bit more what they call freelance. And that is you... you don't have the same employment with the same person or same company, but you are out there looking for, like if you were maybe a writer. Maybe you do an article for a journal, maybe next you do something for a university. Maybe you're going to write a grant so you're, you're kind of skipping around a little bit, but you're finding the work. Another one is starting a business, being an entrepreneur. And I'm guessing that some individuals, now, who, because of their job loss, maybe have started started to think about a a job that they want to or business they want to create. You know, when I was doing my research for my doctorate, I did that on women entrepreneurs in North Dakota. And it was so interesting to hear why someone started their own business and mainly it was flexibility. And when you're doing remote work, you have some flexibility with your working hours, you have some flexibility maybe with how you think about what you are going to work on, especially if you start your own business. So that freelance... that entrepreneurship... those are great opportunities for someone in remote work. And then some are full time employees. So they just don't go to a building, but they're at home, and for many people, that is now that they've experienced it, maybe that's what they want to do for their future.

Jodi: I think, if anything, the pandemic has just reinforced that old adage that necessity is the mother of invention and for many people, certainly in our experience as we have coached people through this remote work, that they are able to find maybe they're doing some blogging or some copy editing or, like you said, writing, which is great. I mean that's helped to keep keep people afloat and supplement their income. And so I appreciate that definition and really thinking about being deliberate and choosing some of those work experiences.

Marie: I think a lot of people are thinking about where do I want to live and then I'll work there. And now remote work allows that. Because there was one of our previous participants here in North Dakota, who is now gone through the program. That's what she said, I wanted to come back to rural North Dakota and yet I can work across the US doing the same work that I was doing in a building. ...