Suggestion: Location for license based projects

[75a2d707]

Problem:

Some professions, IE lawyers, architects, and engineers, require state licensure to do a project in that state.  Many clients I've seen only have the country listed for their location and do not mention in a project posting which state licensure is required.  Some clients are located in different states than the projects they are working on.  I personally spend time on my proposals to try to obtain jobs, and in my opinion it's a bad design flaw to have a lack of information to where a freelancer may not know if they are qualified for the project or not.  I am forced to either ignore projects without a location or to burn time on a proposal on the offchance that the project location is in one of the 2 out of 50 states that I'm licensed in.

Solution:

Upon client selecting the category and/or skills that commonly requires specific location licensure (IE if architecture is selected), provide a mandatory yes/no option to client of "Does this project require a professional License?".  If yes, provide an additional mandatory dropdown or blank box to fill in location where licensure is required.

[prestonhunter]

But this isn't a website for lawyers, architects, and engineers.

This is a general-use freelance work platform.

Upwork can't modify the user interface to accommodate every edge use case.

[75a2d707]

And the platform offers people to seek and provide work for freelance lawyers, architects, and engineers.  The platform is currently setting itself up for failure with those professions, and I provided a simple solution that would only affect those professions in a small but huge way.

Suggesting the UI can't be improved for specific professions sounds like a good way for the platform to keep those professions away.  Upwork is better off if more people use it, not less.  Making a small UI change is not a big ask to greatly increase the viability of upwork for freelancers of multiple professions.

[prestonhunter]

I understand where you are coming from, and I think your comments here are thoughtful and intend to be helpful.

But if I'm being honest, I think such a modification to the user interface is unlikely to happen.

I don't work for Upwork, and I'm not in charge of making such decisions, but I have observed for many years what types of modifictions are made to the client-side user interface used to post jobs. I simply can't think of anything that Upwork has done to accommodate specific job niches, especially ones which comprise such a small percentage of the jobs being posted on the site.

[jr-translation]

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