Any self-taught successful freelancers?

[David T]

Hi, I just signed up for Odesk and was working if anyone had self-taught there way to make money on Odesk? Also, how do I view test scores? Thanks guys.

[Aleksandra K]

Hi David,

The first thing you should do is to put a picture of yourself, as your current picture is violating the UpWork policy.

The best way to earn money on UpWork is to bid on jobs which correspond to your skills and to make sure you always deliver timely and quality results. Happy clients bring positive feedback, more jobs and more money

The results of the tests can be seen from the profile view and if you click on them you can see more details on the percentage for each part. Then you can decide whether you want to make them visible to the public or not.

[Abdul R]

Your profile is not public. Please make it public and I can help you to take a print screen of your test scores to show you. 

[Santiago G]

@ David

I am self taught in several of the skills I have listed on my profile. But the success rate varies with WHERE I'm doing my work.

For example, I work as a programmer and PC repair technician. I haven't done those things as of yet here on UpWork. But that work shows up at my door at random anyway!! As I type this, I still have two freshly repaired laptops, three tablets, and one newly made program sitting here waiting to be picked up by their owners. Most that know me would tell you I'm very successful in this work.

I also make money playing (mostly the bigger online) games (various methods for this). You'd never find a course on this particular "line of work"!! But yet, here I am making money with it.

As a writer, I only know english. So that alone allowed my work to go quite well here so far. Writing work is what I have done the most here. Self taught? Not entirely. But I'll still call it as successful so far. No problems with it at all as of yet.

For your test scores.....

Test scores are seen differently depending where your profile is viewed from. So if you are looking at your profile from the Upwork main site, you'd see, for example, you're in the Top 20% of the given test. But when you check it from here in the forums, you'd see you're in the 80% range. It still amounts to the same thing. I'm not even sure why it's setup like this but oh well !!

[Paul M]

Wow, Santiago, I didn't know the test scores looked different when the link is made from in the forums!

When asked by a prospective client about test scores, I've always used what shows in my profile when viewed by someone else. 2 tests in which I say I'm in the top 10% for, I now find I'm actually in the 98th and 99th percentile for!

I'll be using those statistics in future

[Santiago G]

@ Paul

You were right in saying that you're in the top 10% in the given test. For some unknown reason, the switch only seems to be made in the forums. When checking someone elses or your own profile from a job you / they applied to, it'll show as top 10%. But when the you and/or the client find out a couple million others are also in the top 10%, that's the part that doesn't help you or the couple million others!!

And for some unknown (to me) reason, the Odesk/Upwork Readiness test score doesn't show anywhere other than checking your own profile from the main site.

The other weird one I ran into is the random feedback display. When I check my profile in a job I applied to or on the main site, my feedback is completely there. But when I check my profile here in the forums, it shows random feedback only. I know I don't have a galactic sized list of feedback, but even at that, only some and randomly selected feedback is showing.

[Paul M]

The difference seems to be that, from the profile, the address contains /o/profiles between upwork.com and /users.

THe forum profile is, as you say only a very brief snapshot with random feedback and the percentile scores.

I'm not shure why there's two ways of presenting them. Oh well, another oDesk/Upwork quirk.

[Valeria K]

Hi Paul and Santiago,

The reason you see it differently is that from the Community you are directed to the visitor view of freelancers' profile, in other words that's the way logged out users see it.

I hope it helps.

[John T]

Possibly a tangent this, but having never known there was a "visitor view", I've just taken a look at mine.

Now, not to blow my own trumpet, but all of my feedback, apart from on one job, is all five star, with comments that range from positive to downright effusive. But the sole bit of negative feedback is the first item on the visitor view. And it's not even my most recent work. Seems odd.