Best Entry Level Remote IT Jobs for Career Changers: 8 IT Roles Ranked by Annual Openings, Pay and Barrier to Entry

The best entry level remote IT job for a career changer is computer support specialist, and the reason has nothing to do with growth: it projects about 48,700 openings a year through 2035, which is roughly three and a half times the openings of information security analyst, the fastest growing occupation in the whole field. It is also the only occupation in the computer and IT family for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics declines to name a required degree. Both of those facts sit oddly beside the third one, which is that BLS projects the occupation to shrink by 24,300 positions over the same decade.

Those three things are all true at once, and holding them together is the entire skill of choosing an entry point. Below are the eight computer and IT occupations the Occupational Outlook Handbook publishes separately, ranked on annual openings rather than on growth rate. Wages are May 2025 medians and projections run 2025 to 2035, both read at bls.gov.

Why annual openings beats growth rate for a career changer

Almost every article ranking entry level IT jobs sorts on projected growth, and for someone already inside the field that is a reasonable thing to care about. For someone trying to get in, it is close to the wrong number. Openings are driven mostly by replacement need, meaning people who retire or leave the occupation entirely, and replacement need scales with how many people are already doing the job. Growth is a much smaller component.

Look at what that does to the ranking. Information security analysts is the fastest growing occupation in the field at 21 percent, and it projects 14,100 openings a year. Network and computer systems administrators is projected to lose jobs at 4 percent, and it projects 13,400. Those two numbers are within 700 of each other. One occupation is booming and the other is contracting, and a job hunter sees almost exactly the same number of chances per year either way, because the contracting occupation is 1.7 times larger to begin with.

The same arithmetic is what puts computer support specialists at the top of the table despite the minus sign next to it. Add up the eight rows and the family projects about 245,700 openings a year. Support alone accounts for 48,700 of them, just under one in five, and it is the single row where the education column does not read bachelor's degree. If you are switching careers without a computer science credential, that is not one option among eight. In practical terms it is most of the door.

The one door BLS leaves unlocked

This is worth stating precisely because it is easy to overclaim. In the Occupational Outlook Handbook quick facts table, every computer and IT occupation lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry level education, with one exception. For computer support specialists the field does not name a level at all; it points to the handbook's own guidance instead, and the training column records moderate term on the job training. BLS is not saying a degree never helps here. It is saying there is no single typical credential, which is exactly the condition that lets a career changer compete on evidence rather than on transcripts.

There is a pay split inside that door that most listings hide. BLS reports the two halves of support separately: computer user support specialists earned a median of $61,860 in May 2025, and computer network support specialists earned $76,220. That is $14,360 a year between two roles both advertised as IT support. User support is tickets from employees about laptops, access and passwords. Network support is monitoring, troubleshooting and documenting the network itself. Read the responsibilities rather than the title, because the title will not tell you which one you are applying to.

Pick the exit before you take the entrance

Support is a good entrance and a poor destination, and the projections say so plainly. The occupation is shrinking, and so is the traditional step up from it: network and computer systems administrators is down 4 percent, or 13,200 positions. A lot of that is structural rather than mysterious. Much of what a systems administrator used to do by hand now happens through code and tooling, the kind of setup that provisions servers and ships releases with zero downtime without anyone logging into a box. O*NET, the occupational database built for the US Department of Labor, actually measures this: on its Degree of Automation scale, network and computer systems administrators score 50 and information security engineers score 53, the two highest in the field, while user support scores 27.

That reading has a useful consequence. The most automated IT work is not the help desk, it is infrastructure, and automated work is portable work, which is why those roles went remote years before the rest of the office did. So the pattern to aim for is not to avoid automation but to move toward the judgment that sits on top of it.

Two exits have the numbers behind them. Security is the obvious one: information security analysts pay a $129,180 median, are growing 21 percent, and reward exactly the estate-wide familiarity that a support seat gives you for free. Systems analysis is the underrated one: 32,900 openings a year, more than twice security's, on a base of 544,400 jobs and a $105,850 median. Both are reachable from support inside two or three years, and both are easier to reach from support than from outside IT altogether, which is the actual argument for taking the entry level job.

What gets a remote IT application read

Remote hiring managers are filtering on written evidence, because the interview is the first time they will hear your voice and the application is the only work sample they have. Three habits do most of the work.

Write one specific diagnosis instead of a list of competencies. Describe a problem, what you checked first, what that ruled out, and how you resolved it, in about a paragraph. This is the format of a good ticket, and it demonstrates the skill the job is actually made of. It also separates you immediately from the applicants who wrote adjectives.

State your timezone and working hours in the first two lines. Someone reading forty applications is looking for overlap before anything else, and burying it costs you a read. Then apply early, because fresh postings get read first and the pile is shortest in the first few days, which is why our board only carries listings posted in the last 30 days.

When you are ready to look, remote IT jobs lists the current infrastructure, security and technical support openings with a salary range on every one, and covers the federal telework data behind the field in more depth. From there, entry level remote jobs and remote jobs with no degree required carry the roles across every field that skip the credential filter, remote software engineer jobs covers the largest occupation in the table above, and high paying remote jobs puts these wage figures next to the rest of the market.