I once found myself unemployable as well, maybe what I did can help someone. This was quite a few years ago when the ColdFusion job I had just ended and the job I had before that was in Visual FoxPro (and a few other even less known technologies). Talk about unemployable. Also I am not in a major city, so I was getting pretty much no responses to my resume.
After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.
To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.
And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.
I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.
After a few months I realized I was unemployable and set out to change it. Being unemployed, I luckily had a lot of free time. I made a study of the programming job ads in my target market and if I didn't know what a technology was, I looked it up. I tried to figure out which language was the most asked for, and decided it was PHP (at the time). Also in my studies and in the job ads I noticed that most of the work involved these new-fangled Content Management Systems and so decided I needed to learn one of those, and I chose Joomla. It was a choice I would later come to regret but it got me a job.
To learn these, for both PHP and Joomla I ordered a book from Amazon.com. I limited my search to books published in the last few years and ranked them by customer satisfaction and chose one near the top. And then I made myself go through reading these books and doing the exercises at the end of the chapters. This was very very boring but I made myself do it. Then I created a few Joomla websites for local small businesses for free.
And then, after 6 months of unemployment, I had made myself employable again. I saw a job ad that I was now now barely qualified for, applied, and was hired to maintain a legacy Joomla website. Was it a glam job? No, but it was somewhere to start. And the rest is history. I do think if I found myself unemployable again I could repeat the process and figure out what is being asked for these days and learn that.
I haven't done a study of it lately but I would guess almost any kind of expertise in a major JavaScript framework like Angular, Ember, or React/Flux might get you a remote job fairly easily, as there are very few experts in this and many companies seem to want it. Also most developers don't want to do front-end/JavaScript stuff like that so there is less competition. That's where I'd start looking anyway.