Can Knowledge Work Outside IT Be Done Remotely?

Which knowledge work can be done from another country

• About a third of EU jobs, in principle. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre estimated in 2020 that about 37% of employees in the EU-27 work in jobs that can technically be done from home.
• Better-paid jobs more often than others. The share is higher for well-paid jobs, and many clerical and administrative jobs can be done fully remotely. Most low- and middle-skilled jobs cannot.
• From home to another country. A role that can be done from home can in principle be done from another country too; time zones, language and the rules for working across borders then decide whether it works in practice.
• What the figure measures. It is a 2020 estimate of what is technically possible, not of what employers actually do, and it is the most recent estimate of its kind we found.

Where the limit is, and how to test a role

The test we use has two steps, in this order: physical work (a location, equipment, goods or people to handle), and work that depends on a lot of face-to-face contact, such as selling in person or teaching. A financial analyst and a software engineer get the same answer when both work at a screen.

Four questions show quickly whether a role can be done from somewhere else:

• Does it need to be in a place? Equipment, stock, a site or patients mean it does.
• Is meeting people in person the core of the job? A client meeting now and then can be planned around; a job that is mostly in-person meetings cannot.
• Which hours does it need to share with your team? Most of Africa is 0 to 2 hours from Central European Time.
• Can the systems and data it uses be reached from outside your office? What that takes from outside the EU is on working from outside the EU.

Which roles companies actually move abroad

Revelio Labs followed US companies with 50 or more staff from 2019 to 2024, using online profile data. Revelio calls a role remote-suited when its job postings offer remote work more often than those of the median role.

• Remote-suited work grows faster abroad. Headcount in roles well suited to remote work grew about 49% abroad, against 34% at home.
• In Revelio's chart of offshore growth by role, the first two are outside IT: content specialists and economists. Software engineers, data and web roles, recruiters and security roles follow.

Where this work is heading

A lot of knowledge work outside IT already runs on the habits of a software team. A business analyst writes the requirements a development team builds from; a project manager runs the tickets and the planning.

Tunga's founder, Ernesto Spruyt, expects much of this work to be organized more and more like the work of a software engineer: in the same tools, by people who direct AI tools and judge what comes back. What happens to judgment and review when AI writes more of the work is on when AI writes the code, what becomes the bottleneck, and what it means for work beyond software in the blog If you mostly work at a computer, this is how your job will change.

How Tunga staffs knowledge work outside IT

• One partner for roles in and outside IT. Besides software, data and AI, Tunga staffs project managers, business analysts, content specialists and virtual assistants. Software stays the core; the full list is on roles, stacks and countries.
• The staffing side is the same as for a developer. Tunga handles contracts, payments and compliance, and onboarding; a delivery manager checks in with both sides at least once a month; and Tunga replaces the person when they leave or it isn't working.