Balancing a career and the demands of parenthood can be stressful, especially during the pandemic. We recently surveyed more than 1,100 parents with children 18 or younger living at home and found that 60% of respondents have experienced burnout in the past year.
Furthermore, 61% of parents say they want to work remotely full-time after the pandemic, while 37% prefer a hybrid work arrangement.
So, which jobs have lower stress and offer flexibility? We consulted the online careers database O*Net, run by the U.S. Department of Labor. One of O*Net’s resources is a list of occupations rated by their level of required “stress tolerance,” defined as how much a given job “requires accepting criticism and dealing calmly and effectively with high-stress situations.”
Jobs are rated from 0 to 100. Those with higher ratings are more stressful and require more stress tolerance from the people doing them.
We compared the hundreds of jobs with lower stress levels (less than 80) on O*Net’s list to the database to compile a list of jobs that are both lower stress, marked as having a bright outlook (expected to grow rapidly in the next several years, or will have large numbers of job openings), and offer remote work options.
47 Lower-Stress Remote Jobs
The jobs below are ordered from lowest to highest in terms of their stress-level rating. All of them fall below 80 on the stress tolerance ratings, and each job links to current remote openings.
- Operations Research Analyst (61)
- Business Intelligence Analyst (63)
- Bioinformatics Technician (63)
- Statistician (64)
- Tutor (65)
- Document Management Specialist (65)
- Search Marketing Strategist (66)
- Biostatistician (67)
- Sustainability Specialist (68)
- Technical Writer (69)
- Financial Examiner (69)
- Environmental Scientist (69)
- Database Architect (69)
- Business Continuity Planner (69)
- Actuary (70)
- Data Warehousing Specialist (71)
- Computer Network Architect (71)
- Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks (71)
- Paralegal and Legal Assistant (72)
- Market Research Analyst and Marketing Specialist (72)
- Regulatory Affairs Specialist (73)
- Librarian and Media Collections Specialist (73)
- Information Security Analyst (73)
- Dietitian and Nutritionist (73)
- Compliance Officer (73)
- Clinical Data Manager (73)
- Web Developer (74)
- Database Administrator (74)
- Validation Engineer (75)
- Training and Development Specialist (75)
- Software Quality Assurance Analyst and Tester (75)
- Secretary and Administrative Assistant (75)
- Quality Control Analyst (75)
- Marketing Manager (75)
- Loan Interviewer and Clerk (75)
- Health Education Specialist (75)
- Compensation, Benefits, and Job Analysis Specialist (75)
- Customer Service Representative (77)
- Speech-Language Pathologists (78)
- Sales Engineer (78)
In Case You’re Curious: The Most Stressful Jobs
For comparison’s sake, which jobs do O*Net rate as the absolute most stressful, with scores of 95 or higher? Some examples:
- Patient Representative (95)
- Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners (95)
- Transit and Railroad Police (96)
- First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers (96)
- Acute Care Nurses (97)
- Telephone Operators (98)
- Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates (98)
- Film and Video Editors (99)
- Urologists (100)
It’s interesting to note that there are no “zero-stress” jobs—the job with the lowest stress rating (Models) earns a 24.