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Udalenka as a threat

Among the scenarios of how the world will look after a pandemic, I have not seen one. Very formidable and most likely. Udalenka will hit those who are used to working anyhow. And most of these, obviously, are in Moscow.

Now in more detail. Most companies see working from home as an opportunity to save money on the office. Therefore, in fact, this method of organizing labor was not so popular: an office is not such an important item of expenditure to remake everything for it.

But soon it will reach them: the real gain from the udalenka is not in this


In the medium term, companies will dramatically improve the quality of candidates. After all, the armor-piercing plus udalenki is the breadth of the funnel when hiring people. While you are looking for workers among Muscovites, you should either have an HR brand the size of Everest, or those who live in the radius of a couple of public transport stops will come to you. The choice is narrow, and it’s painful to dismiss - who else will you type.

Remote work allows you to hire people who are hungry, greedy for work and career growth from the province, who rested on the ceiling in their small town. Until recently, only narrow niches such as teaching, call centers and accounting were available to them. Now the tectonic shift will open access for hundreds of professions. And income worthy by regional standards is a great motivator for the "far suburbs" stretching from Sakhalin to the very west of the country.

And this changes the distribution of money in the country


If the current system takes money from the regions up, the udalenka sends it back in small streams. That udalenka makes it possible to equalize grades of salaries not according to the principle “in the capital they pay stupidly more” but according to real merits.

But ... Wait a moment. And then what prevents people from poorer countries from applying for jobs of “big white people”? They have more motivation, less chance of a decent career. Perhaps, the conditional "golden billion" is separated from them by one thing: education.

In the late 1990s, “offshore” programming in Novosibirsk made IT professions incredibly popular there. Everyone saw the difference between those who live on $ 200 and $ 2,000. As the number of those who get a normal job and decent pay on a distance increases, more and more people will see this difference. From the regions to the capital, from Russia to the world. The plasticity of the working mass will be much higher.

One thing will remain the same: a barrier on this path.


Education. It will remain the only qualification, not geography. This is what the current transformation and quarantine entail.

ps This column is Skyeng managing partneralexwalwrote for the project Snob . We decided to bring her here with slight reductions.

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