🐈
» Forums » New to Upwork » Re: Hey guys! Is anyone willing to look at my...
Page options
ricea710
Community Member

Hey guys! Is anyone willing to look at my profile and give me suggestions towards first job?

Thank you!! I am newer to this site and would like to gain some work from it. If you could give me any suggestions towards my profile, that would be awesome. 

 

2 REPLIES 2
mwiggenhorn
Community Member

Hide the below average test score, for sure.  Be more specific about your experiences and expertise.  What skills do you have that a client will want?  You have one grammatical error, too.  Helping in classrooms since you were 17 should instead give the number of years you have been doing this. Clarify how you want to work on the platform - tutoring or something else.

 

Good luck and hang in there.  It takes a while to get traction on the platform!

craiggabriel
Community Member

$7 an hour is crazy low, well below minimum wage. I assume you put that down because you figure no one will hire you at a decent rate when you're new, but you're probably better off trying for a more reasonable rate. A super low rate probably won't increase your chances of being hired more than slightly, and the clients who pay that low are on average more likely to be dishonest, difficult to deal with, apt to give negative feedback etc., so a tiny increase in likelihood of being hired probably isn't even worth it.

 

You can always adjust the rate for a given job. What you put on your profile is kind of like "Here's what I think I'm worth," so it looks bad, and unconfident, if it's really low. On specific job proposals you can always go above or below your figure, depending on what the client is offering, how appealing the job is to you, the nature of the work, etc.

 

Your profile is really, really thin right now. The intro is just a couple paragraphs, there's no portfolio, there are few tests, there's only a little education and employment background. Now some of that is simply because you're young and still very early in your work life and so it's unavoidable you'll have less content for your profile than a lot of people do. But anywhere you can beef that up, do so.

 

Are there more relevant tests you can take? (I'd like to see you do better on the ones you do take. Your scores are disappointingly mediocre for a college graduate who has studied English and education and such.) Have you written tests, lesson plans, or anything like that as a teacher that you could upload to your portfolio as an example of high quality work you are capable of? If not, is there something like that that you could create now, even if not as part of an actual job, but more as a hypothetical example of the kind of material you are capable of coming up with if called upon?

 

When I read your introduction it feels kind of out of place in the sense that an online freelance platform isn't where one finds a conventional classroom teaching job. Presumably the idea is you're looking for online work that overlaps with the kinds of things one does as a classroom teacher--perhaps some kind of distance learning, online tutoring, etc.--but if so I shouldn't have to infer it. You should be a lot more explicit about that, and talk about it in detail. What kinds of online jobs are you looking for? What skills and experience do you have that are relevant to such jobs? Etc.

 

You may not be entirely sure this early in your time here what sort of jobs you want, or can realistically hope to get, and thus it might seem premature to direct your introduction that way. In that case, I would say to spend a significant amount of time perusing the job listings. Make a note of any job where you can honestly say, "That's one I'd be good at, and one I'd like to do if given the opportunity." Once you have found a substantial number of those, you'll be in a better position to rewrite and expand your introduction to make it relevant to your job searching.

 

The wording in the introduction and the employment history comes across to me as the kind of wooden, generic, by-the-book, jargony, euphemistic style that's conventionally used for such things but that I've never liked. I don't know if that's a plus or a minus for attracting clients though. It's the pseudo-formal, impersonal style people are taught to use, so maybe it works.

 

Don't pluralize a word by adding apostrophe-s. (This is a pet peeve of mine, and the one exception I'm inclined to make in my opposition to the death penalty.)

 

Use "an" instead of "a" before "urban."

 

Calling first graders "scholars" reads weird.

 

Be sure to read all the introductory material available here in the forums for new users. Be very, very wary of any job invitations you get for jobs you didn't even apply for. If anyone wants to interview you through Google Hangouts, run for your life.

Latest Articles
Featured Topics
Learning Paths