Report: Home office offerings are growing – even after Corona
An analysis of tens of thousands of online job offers shows More and more companies are offering work from home even after the pandemic.
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According to an analysis, job offers for home office jobs have increased significantly in five years – even after the pandemic. The Bertelsmann Foundation reported that the proportion of online job advertisements with the option to work from home has increased fivefold since 2019 to almost 18% in 2023. However, the growth trend, which has continued even after the end of the coronavirus pandemic, varies by region and industry. According to the report, Düsseldorf is the "German home office capital".
There are particularly many offers in the IT sector, where working from home (HO) is almost standard. The foundation analyzed a total of 55 million online job advertisements. The analysis shows what companies advertise, but gives no indication of the extent to which these offers are accessed.
Argument in the search for skilled workers
Before the start of the pandemic, HO played almost no role in Germany: in 2019, only 3.7 percent of all online job advertisements offered the option of working from home. By 2022, this figure had risen to 16.8 percent and, according to the study, now stands at 17.6 percent of the online job advertisements examined. "Working from home has not only become established in many industries. It is becoming an important argument in the battle for skilled workers," said labor market expert Gunvald Herdin from the Bertelsmann Foundation.
HO offers for foreign language teachers were ahead of the IT sector in terms of numbers, with a home office rate of 72%, which is presumably due to the many virtual courses on offer. At the lowest end of the scale in 2023 are professions in the skilled trades and geriatric care – hardly surprising, as there is practically no alternative to working in person.
More working from home in conurbations
The analysis also sees a clear divide between urban and rural areas. The background to this is that more companies that offer their employees to work from home have settled in conurbations. In large cities, the rate is around 26 percent. For the North Rhine-Westphalian state capital, a share of 34.1 percent was calculated for 2023 among online job offers, closely followed by Frankfurt am Main (33.6 percent) and Stuttgart (32.9 percent). In contrast, extremely few HO offers were found in sparsely populated districts.
(emw)