Spent the last few months watching people get rejected from remote jobs not because they lacked experience, but because they fumbled basic stuff in the interview — couldn't share a Google Doc properly, didn't know what a "shared drive" was, froze up when asked to hop on a Teams call.
Here's the thing nobody tells you: most "entry level remote job" postings assume you already know Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 inside and out. Nobody teaches this in school. You're just expected to know it.
A few quick wins if you're prepping for remote/office work right now:
Learn the difference between Viewer/Commenter/Editor permissions in Google Docs — this comes up constantly and getting it wrong looks bad
Get comfortable with basic Excel/Sheets formulas (SUM, VLOOKUP, IF) — even a non-analyst role will ask you to build a simple tracker at some point
Practice actual video call etiquette — camera on, mute when not talking, look at the camera not the screen. Sounds obvious, matters a lot in practice
Understand async communication — a lot of remote work happens in Slack/Teams messages, not meetings. Learn to write a clear, specific message instead of "hey can we chat"
None of this is hard. It's just never explicitly taught, so people learn it the hard way on the job (or don't get the job at all).
Curious what tripped other people up most when they started remote work — drop it below.