If you want to work from home or anywhere in the world, consider a career in project management, technology, or communications.

As some high-profile companies tighten return-to-office mandates, employers in these fields are still hiring for more remote, flexible roles, according to new research from FlexJobs. 

The site found a 20% increase in the number of remote job listings in 2024 compared to 2023, returning to growth levels last seen in 2022.

But workers who hope for a return to earlier, more accommodating norms might not want to get too excited. Other signs point to a continued decline: On LinkedIn, for example, just 8% of jobs were remote as of December 2024, down from 18% in early 2022.

Work-from-anywhere jobs, in which employees are can function from any location or time zone, are rare and only account for about 5% of all remote roles, FlexJobs reports. 

The site analyzed its database and determined which companies had the highest volume of remote, location-flexible job postings between January and December 2024 in order to identify the top companies hiring for such positions right now.

All of the companies included in the ranking offer full-time or part-time remote jobs that don’t have a location restriction and require no time in the office. You can check out the full list here.

Here are 10 companies with a high volume of work-from-anywhere job postings, according to FlexJobs:

1. Veeva
2. Invisible Technologies
3. Canonical
4. Social Discovery Group
5. Wikimedia Foundation
6. Remote
7. Chainlink Labs
8. Nethermind
9. Gamurs Group
10. CloudLinux

“Trends like digital nomadism and the wider availability of digital nomad visas are driving demand for work-from-anywhere jobs — but the marketplace is still highly competitive,” Toni Frana, FlexJobs’s career expert manager, tells CNBC Make It.

To improve your chances of landing one of these roles, Frana advises applying to at least two or three companies, networking with employees at your target organizations, and seeking referrals.

Among the most in-demand roles that companies are hiring for are product managers and software engineers, both of which offer average salaries exceeding $100,000 in the U.S., according to ZipRecruiter.

Such jobs typically require, at a minimum, a bachelor’s degree and technical skills, including a knowledge of programming languages and project management software.

Many companies are also hiring for work-from-anywhere roles like sales development representatives and marketing and editorial positions. About 70% of the remote job listings on FlexJobs’s database are for jobs at an intermediate or experienced level.

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Sabina Nawaz knows what turns her off in job interviews.

She is an executive coach with over two decades of experience, and prior to starting her own firm, Nawaz worked at Microsoft for 15 years, including as a senior director of human resources.

Some of her top job interview red flags are not showing up on time, not having the camera positioned correctly if you’re doing a virtual interview and not following up with a “thank you” message.  

“I cannot tell you the number of people who simply don’t get the basics right,” she says. Another major red flag is not being prepared to talk about your strengths — but Nawaz has a simple trick to help people identify and highlight theirs.

When job candidates get asked about their strengths, they often give vague answers that don’t really give a sense of who they are, and what they are capable of.

They’ll say, “I’m smart, I work hard and I get things done,” says Nawaz. “Good for you. You and everybody else.” Instead, you want to figure out what’s unique about you, and how to frame that within stories that really crystalize it.

Nawaz suggests coming up with 20 to 30 examples of personal endeavors or projects, “whether at home or at work, that you did yourself, you enjoyed doing and you were proud of,” she says. These can be as recent as today and can go as far back as when you were a kid. Within those, see which strengths come up the most.

Are you a fast learner? Do you love to build things? And when it comes to the jobs you’re applying for, “which of these set you apart?”

When it comes to how to present your strengths in an interview, break up your anecdotes into two main parts: the problem and the solution. “Spend about 50% of your time outlining the problem and 50% of the time outlining your strength,” says Nawaz.

Start by articulating what your strength is and then explain, in depth, what the problem was. Next, describe how you solved the issue, and connect that success back to your strength.

At the end of your story, make sure to explain the results of what you did as well. Say something like, “we landed the clients in our consultancy firm,” she says. “Not only was it a million-dollar contract, but they renewed for five years straight.”

When Nawaz works with her clients, “we curate a library of stories,” she says. At the end of the process, they have dozens of anecdotes at their disposal.

She highly recommends doing the same. That way, regardless of what you get asked in an interview, “you can plug and play these stories” and choose the one that’s most relevant and best shows you off.

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Despite a prolific career composing soundtracks for hit movies and TV shows, one of Mark Mothersbaugh’s most lucrative pieces of music is a song he wrote nearly 50 years ago.

The composer, who has worked on films like “Thor: Ragnarok” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and shows including “Rugrats” and “What We Do in the Shadows,” is also a founding member of the band Devo.

The group’s debut album was released in 1978, with the Mothersbaugh-penned “Uncontrollable Urge” serving as its first track. Though the song didn’t chart particularly well when it was released, it received an unexpected second life decades later when it was made the theme song for MTV’s hit show “Ridiculousness.”

The comedy show has become one of MTV’s most aired programs and turned “Uncontrollable Urge” into Mothersbaugh’s main moneymaker over its more than 1,500 frequently rerun episodes.

“I’ve written so many other songs for films and television shows,” the 74-year-old Mothersbaugh told Rolling Stone in a recent profile on TV theme song writers. “I would’ve been shocked [years ago] if you told me this is the one that would become this prime source of income.”

While “Rolling Stone” reports that “Uncontrollable Urge’s” lifetime Spotify streaming royalties total only around $150,000, Mothersbaugh’s wife and manager Anita Greenspan told the magazine that he takes home roughly $1 million per year in royalties.

The success of “Ridiculousness” is particularly satisfying to Mothersbaugh and Greenspan because of the relationship Devo had with the network. Greenspan said that “Uncontrollable Urge’s” frequent appearances on MTV are “ironic and kind of funny.”

“In the beginning of MTV you saw a lot of Devo because they were early to make videos, but MTV started questioning the videos Devo were making. [The videos] were subversive, they didn’t like them and wouldn’t play them anymore,” she said. “Now ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ is easily the most-played song on MTV, so [Devo] wins.’”  

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Bill Gates thinks everyone should read his “favorite book on AI,” one that predicts artificial intelligence will change what most jobs look like — across nearly every industry — within the next five years.

The book is called “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” Published in 2023, it was written by AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded the research lab DeepMind. He sold it to Google in 2014 and now serves as CEO of Microsoft AI.

“It’s the book I recommend more than any other on AI — to heads of state, business leaders, and anyone else who asks — because it offers something rare: a clear-eyed view of both the extraordinary opportunities and genuine risks ahead,” Gates wrote in a blog post last month.

DON’T MISS: How to use AI to be more productive and successful at work

In the book, Suleyman predicted that rapid advances in AI development will completely change the way nearly every industry operates. He cited a 2023 study from consulting group McKinsey, which estimated roughly half of all “work activities” will become automated, starting as soon as 2030.

The ramifications of AI “will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work,” Suleyman wrote. More than 400 million global workers could need to transition to new jobs or roles, according to McKinsey.

AI will help employees be more efficient — as in some cases it already does — but only at first, Suleyman wrote.

“These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence,” he wrote. “They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing.”

From physical manufacturing to “cognitive labor,” the AI revolution is set to touch basically every industry, Suleyman wrote.

There will eventually be “few areas” where humans can outperform machines. AI will quickly outpace human workers at office tasks like administration, customer service and content creation, according to Suleyman.

The increased input will likely result in two realities, he wrote. Employers will create millions of new jobs in response to economic growth. But not all of that work will go to humans, Suleyman notes: Employers will still opt for the “abundance of ultra-low-cost equivalents” whenever possible.

Some positions are and will be more difficult for AI to replicate. Those include skilled trades like plumbers and electricians, as well as white collar roles that rely heavily on social skills, critical thinking, and creativity.

Still, nearly everyone will likely need to upskill — and learn how to incorporate this kind of technology into their current jobs — as AI services become more prevalent in every industry over the next several years. Many others will need to transition into entirely new careers, Suleyman wrote.

That shift is already underway. A 2023 EY survey found that 41% of U.S. companies polled were implementing plans for training employees to work with AI products.

Basic AI skills — like prompt engineering, machine learning and data literacy — are a key hiring factor for nearly 70% of employers, according to a March 2024 Slack Workforce Lab survey of more than 10,000 professionals.

Some experts suggest the economic benefits of AI will create enough new jobs to outweigh those lost.

Artificial intelligence will create 78 million more positions than it eliminates by 2030, and the future of work will revolve around collaboration between humans and machines, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 predicted earlier this month.

But even AI optimists agree that huge changes in how people work are likely to result in a period of dramatic transition. New jobs enabled by AI’s advances won’t come soon enough to rescue large portions of the global workforce, Suleyman predicted in his book.

AI will “eliminate a lot of current jobs, [and] there will be classes of jobs that totally go away,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a May 2024 discussion with MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

Both Suleyman and Gates remain optimistic overall about AI’s potential to change people’s lives for the better.

If workers and leaders prepare for massive changes, everyone should be able to enjoy benefits from “breakthrough treatments for deadly diseases, innovative solutions for climate change, and high-quality education for everyone,” Gates wrote last month.

To achieve that best-case scenario, humans need to embrace AI by learning to work with new technologies as they’re implemented in their daily lives and careers, Suleyman argued.

That could start with exploring free online AI services, like ChatGPT or other AI-powered large language models. More advanced options include taking online courses to learn AI skills like prompt engineering.

“This is a monumental challenge whose outcome will, without hyperbole, determine the quality and nature of day-to-day life in this century and beyond,” wrote Suleyman.

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Drew Houston’s company was born from a very millennial problem.

As a student at MIT, Houston repeatedly lost USB drives with important information on them, he told “Lenny’s Podcast” in an episode that aired earlier this month. In 2007, at age 24, he got fed up and created a cloud storage platform for his own personal use. Later, he built it out into the file-hosting company Dropbox — which has a $9.62 billion market cap, as of Thursday afternoon.

“I started Dropbox more out of just personal frustration,” said Houston, now 41. “It really felt like something only I was super interested in as far as file syncing, and focusing on one customer, which was myself.”

DON’T MISS: How to use AI to be more productive and successful at work

This wasn’t Houston’s first entrepreneurial foray: He’d launched an SAT prep company called Accolade in 2004. The gig was “ramen profitable, so to speak, but more importantly a great introduction to the wild world of starting companies,” he writes on his LinkedIn profile.

Dropbox’s success, in contrast, gave Houston a net worth of of $2.3 billion, according to Forbes. He remains the company’s CEO today, overseeing more than 700 million users from 180 different countries on the platform.

But Dropbox’s growth didn’t happen overnight.

Popularizing cloud storage was a double-edged sword, Houston said: As Dropbox became popular, it increasingly had to survive competition from giants like Apple, Microsoft and Google.

“All of them launched competing products in one form or another,” said Houston. “Steve Jobs was on stage in 2011 announcing iCloud, calling out Dropbox by name as something that will be viewed as archaic. And similarly, we always felt like we were in the shadow of the hammer of Google launching Google Drive.”

Dropbox was relatively large itself by that point, with a reported $4 billion valuation in 2011. Over the next few years, it acquired an email app called Mailbox and launched a photo management app called Carousel.

But new product lines couldn’t solve a bigger problem: By 2015, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram were providing some of Dropbox’s core file-sharing services for free.

“They just totally nuked our business model … [It was] even worse because it was so easily anticipated,” Houston said. “So this became a very public and personal embarrassment for me. How could we not have predicted that, or been out in front of that?”

Houston read business books to help him strategize, including “Playing to Win” by ex-Proctor and Gamble head Alan G. Lafley, he said. His takeaway: Focus on what you can control and do well, instead of what your competitors are doing.

Dropbox shuttered Carousel and Mailbox, cutting an undisclosed amount of staff. It launched Magic Pocket in 2015, an “in-house multi-exabyte storage system” that allowed Dropbox users to handle bigger file uploads and store files at a larger scale — a new competitive edge, said Houston.

The lesson, he said, is to view challenges as opportunities to improve: Without the strong competition, Dropbox might never have pushed itself to grow.

“Every time you move up a league, your reward is a stronger and better opponent and potentially a more unlevel playing field,” said Houston. “That’s just the way it is. You can’t control that. All you can control is how you respond.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Dropbox has more than 700 million users from 180 different countries, according to its website.

Want to up your AI skills and be more productive? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work. Expert instructors will teach you how to get started, practical uses, tips for effective prompt-writing, and mistakes to avoid. Sign up now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $67 (+ taxes and fees) through February 11, 2025.