🐈
» Forums » New to Upwork » Re: Multiple profiles on Upwork for different...
Page options
jakorsme
Community Member

Multiple profiles on Upwork for different categories

I do two very distinct things as a freelancer, I am a professional photographer and I am also a software developer (my current upwork profile). Although both are independent divisions (completely different branding, dba, clients, customers, etc) of my corporation, they are both wholly owned by my company (use the same corporate bank account, taxid, etc.).

 

I want to be able to bid on upwork photography projects, but it's extremely difficult using my software development profile; ie. different work history, skill set, rate structure, DBA, etc. It's completely different, although the person performing both types of work is still me.

 

Why can't I use upwork for both, rather than being forced to one of your competitors for my photography?

30 REPLIES 30
cylver1z
Community Member

Hello John,

 

Please note that you are not allowed to have multiple accounts here in Upwork. However, you can include both of your photography & software development skills and experience in your profile. You can also add some of your sample products in your portfolio to showcase your skills. Thank you.


Untitled

Yeah Ryan - that's not an acceptable answer nor position.

 

1) Upwork only permits an anemic 10 skills - this isn't even sufficient for the software development - it's certainly not supportive of both photographic and software contracting.

 

2) You obviously didn't read my post, where I itemized that projects, clients, job history, skills, EVERYTHING is different. Mixing the two would do nothing but confuse a potential client.

 

3) Are you kidding me with this single profile rule - all this policy accomplishes is to send your customers to the competition, because you don't think out your policy and how it negatively  impacts your customers.

 

4) I've noticed this rather severe underlying contempt for your customer base and their professional needs from Upwork since joining. Maybe I need to post some social reviews.

John:

Ryan is extremely professional. He is communicating accurate information to you and answering your question.

 

You are welcome to discuss this topic here in the Forum and propose changes to how Upwork operates. Many positive changes at Upwork have come about as a result of discussions that began here.

 

But for future reference, the expected tenor of discourse in the Forum is polite, defferential, sedate. And we don't need to make threats in order to be heard.

Preston - I felt Ryan's response was disingenuous and dismissive.

I think most of us who are regular Forum participants are accustomed to the tone and manner found in Moderator postings. I am unable to gauge how the moderator's response felt to you, because I lack your perspective as a newcomer to the Forum.

 

We welcome information from moderators, but these threads are typically conversations among Upwork users. Not a dialogue between users and moderators. Don't look at Ryan or any other moderator as being "Upwork" or the cause of any policies you don't like. They don't make policy decisions. Their job is to offer information and assistance.

Preston,
The fact that you find no issue with Ryan's response is not relevant. The response given was "..disingenuous and dismissive." It failed to address the problem brought to the table and merely reinterated the Upwork Policies.

If Ryan does not speak for upwork and has no influence on change, restating the root of the issue and completly failing to address the issue was a poor decision.

John took the time to state rather eloquently a very real issue on this platform. An issue that is easily identified by anyone with any business sense and experience. It is not just in their communities best interests to address this, but in their own as well.

 

If you lack prospective and fail to understand what John was talking about, I recommend you simply keep quiet. You are distracting and siderailing a discussion about a real issue to talk about your feelings and what you're accustomed to.

John, 
Let's not stoop to threats shall we? 

Well John:

 

I will be more brutal than Preston. 

 

Let me first be polite.  Upwork has been plagued by fake multiple profiles by freelancers.  If they open the gate for you 'officially' they can't prevent others to take advantage and scam buyers.

 

Now I will be brutal.  Let's have an analogy.  All countries have 1 person = 1 vote.  You can't have 2 votes becasue you claim **Edited for Community Guidelines**  Thus you have two personalities and deserve 2 votes.

 

 

Prashant,

 

Well, I'm certainly not advocating fake or scam profiles and I'm not sure I accept that supporting the structure I have (and I'm sure there are other legitimate instances of this structure where an individual does more than one thing professionally), is some how condusive to illicit activity.

 

The solution seems to be rather straight forward and is being used in other online systems. Basically you have one controlling profile, that contains the individual's or corporation's verified data, banking info, etc. Then you might have two sub-profiles that contain division specific info, like project history, skills, etc.

 

This structure is sucessfully implemented and functioning on other sites as I mentioned. One of which is a site for photographers to sell services and finished product to customers/clients, where a photographer may do both glamour and wedding photography and it's important to keep them distinct, including project history and work product. That's just one example.

 

Perhaps Upwok is not a suitable platform for you to use.

Maybe rather than being patronizing and dismissive, it might be well to recognize that there are legitimate business needs for users of Upwork, that although foreign to your own model, are nonetheless worth valuing by this platform (in fact ones which are already recognized, valued and embraced by similar platforms) and most certainly don't deserve your "if you don't like it, leave" response.

OK enough mumbo jumbo.  You as a coder should recognize that each platform has its own infrastucture and support modules.  The current Upwork infrastructure does not permit it or they have made a business decision not to invest in such a thing.

 

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

 

It is their business.  They are not running a charity.  Accomodating every John and Johanna is not in their mission statement. They can decide whatever they want to and however hey want to.  If you were to volunteer to develop such an infrasturcture that is abuse proof they may entertain the idea.

kat303
Community Member

John, Instead of being "p'd o" if you maybe asked " can anyone give me advice on how to structure my profile to include 2 competely different skills", you would have gotten a better reception and response.

 

Currently Upwork only allows one profile.  This is their site, these are their rules. There have been and are, sites that allow seperate profiles. This site is not one of them. So you have 2 choices, to restructure your profile in a way to showcase both skills, or to look and work on a freelancer site that accomodates what you need.

 

 

I have no use for it myself.

 

But to John's credit... He DID provide a rational and technically feasible explanation for how his idea could be put into practice while answering Prashant's primary concern about fraudulent profiles.

 

(Of course, that is not the only reason why Upwork does things the way they do.)

Hi John, 

I agree with a lot of what you're saying because I'm also an entpreneur and have multiple businesses.  Although in upwork I'm usually a customer.     I've two separate businesses one in software and the other in online and local retail.   The only way you can achieve here what you're planning is to have two different corporate or LLC entities.   First off , the way you're doing business Photograhy and software development on one single bank account and entity is completely not the way to do if you're running real businesses.   Real businesses have to be classified separately under different category and code and they need to have separate tax ids and accounting etc.,     Those are serious businesses.   Having it that way will also protect you from claims and have proper insurance.    On the long run it will pay off.   It's not a major overhead.     Once you have separate business entities you can designate them here without issues.      But if you don't want to separate your businesses, then it basically looks like a part time hobby work.   

 

Hi Paul: One follow-up to your discussion. You can set up two business entities under one bank/tax account, with one being a "Doing Business As" (DBA) entity. This avoids the need for multiple tax filings and bank accounts. That said, you still need to keep separate records for each business. Regardless, I see the same deficiency in the Upwork platform that John has described, and his proposed solution to the problem makes sense. Upwork is free to do whatever they want with the platform, but I presume they are interested in making more money. And preventing clients/users from promoting their multiple business entities as they need would seem counter to that goal. 

I COMPLETELY disagree. John has two distinct skillsets. I'm in the same boat. Multiple profiles for legitimately different services is hardly the same thing as FRAUDULENT, fake profiles. I hope Upwork reconsiders this policy and invests in fraud detection rather than stifle activity on the platform.


@Jessica O wrote:

I COMPLETELY disagree. John has two distinct skillsets. I'm in the same boat. Multiple profiles for legitimately different services is hardly the same thing as FRAUDULENT, fake profiles. I hope Upwork reconsiders this policy and invests in fraud detection rather than stifle activity on the platform.


FWIW Upwork is trying out a system that allows freelancers to have multiple profile tabs on their profile page. I've seen a few profiles of that sort. But as yet it has only limited availability. I think the trial scheme is only for certain categories, and maybe it's invitation-only. I don't know.

Glad to see this get addressed.

 

I think we are getting hung up on semantics, or in avoiding something that is "hard" to change.  I don't really care what you call it, but I think it's perfectly valid for one account (one vote in your analogy) to play multiple roles for multiple audiences. For example, the following circumstances can both be true: 1) a developer who writes technical books and wants his audience to know it, and 2) a developer who writes nobels and would never write about his main job, but wants to offer his writing skills in something other-than. Both should be able to choose their target audience.

As far as hard to change, perhaps adding tags instead of tables in the database on the Upwork schema might makes the feature easier to implement?

I don't know, the ability to configure multiple audiences just seems like a reasonable request to me... 


Carl G wrote:

I think we are getting hung up on semantics, or in avoiding something that is "hard" to change.  I don't really care what you call it, but I think it's perfectly valid for one account (one vote in your analogy) to play multiple roles for multiple audiences. For example, the following circumstances can both be true: 1) a developer who writes technical books and wants his audience to know it, and 2) a developer who writes nobels and would never write about his main job, but wants to offer his writing skills in something other-than. Both should be able to choose their target audience.

As far as hard to change, perhaps adding tags instead of tables in the database on the Upwork schema might makes the feature easier to implement?

I don't know, the ability to configure multiple audiences just seems like a reasonable request to me... 


You have responded to a post from September 2018. Upwork does give freelancers the ability to create specialized profiles now (but it's still against the rules for freelancers to have more than one account). 

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

John, 


I apologise if you feel that the team has a lack of concern for the Community. And if any of the Upwork team make you feel otherwise, please know that it is not what we intend to do. We try our best to make sure that we get back to all users on a timely manner, and assist each, and everyone who has raised an issue or a concern, here in the Community or through any other means. If you have further feedback on how we can make our services better, you may post it here, or reach out to any of our Team Leaders, Vladimir, and Valeria, or our Manager, Lena.

 

Going back on your original post, I would like to share this announcement post by Lena about Specialized Profiles for Freelancers in Mobile Development. This allows for users in the Mobile Development category to create a secondary profile on the same account and profile. Our goal is to launch this option in other categories in 2018. However, please note that we are currently only testing this option and will base our decision on testing results and feedback from our users.

 

 


~ Avery
Upwork
hamzain
Community Member

In fact, I want to ask a question on this purpose. Since it is difficult to succeed in a new added skill "photography in this case" due to the freelancer background "software developer". Is it possible to tell your own clients about those skills, so that they hire you when needed or recommend you to other clients?

jakorsme
Community Member

Hi Hamza,

 

The challenge is that it is not the same clients (or even perspective clients), which contract me for photography versus software. Essentially it is two distinct businesses, with distinct marketing, contracts, engagements and of course deliverables. For instance as a software architect and developer, it is typically the CIO or technology project manager who brings me in. With the photography, it is typically a marketing manager, art director/creative director. Completely distinct islands of operation within a company. For the most part my software clients are not even aware of my photography clients and vice versa.

It's possible on a platform such as upwork, where I get the impression clients are considerably smaller, that there is some crossover, but clients like contractors that specialize. I'm not sure they'd particularly embrace, two rather desparet skill sets at a professional level from a single contractor. I think they'd probably have more of the mindset of "decide which career you want already" - that's why I've always kept the two distinct - but I've reached the point where I'm very proficient at both.

Avery,

 

It is something that many of would like to have: The ability to categorize skills. So I really hope that UW keeps this on the roadmap and makes it happen.If one can be a client and freelancer on one account, It should  also be possible to make separate divisions for different skill sets.  

I would love to have two profiles (or more) because I have two very different skill sets I want to promote and having them in one profile I think is confusing.

 

For example I do independent project management work and genealogy research.   They are very different with very different audiences.  If I have one first then someone finds me may never see the second skill that they were actually looking for.  

 

This is really needed IMO

I agree that having the tabs Avery mentioned would be beneficial for many of us. I was going to suggest that to John because I saw a couple of profiles where the freelancer has these tabs and I was wondering how to do it. Now I understand they have been testing it only in software development. But I hope it gets implemented soon for everyone. The way the profile is today forces you to offer just one thing only, or to have 10 skills belonging to only one career path. Because of this limitation many people try to bind everything together in one profile and end up looking bad as a "jack of all trades" while they may be great at different skillsets. You can be a great writer and also a great engineer. Why not?

what about for 1 as a freelancer and 1 as a buyer I have recently created one as a freelancer and would also like to hire people to help with my business such as graphic design or other parts of a starting business. I have no way to post a job only to search talent or buy premade content which would not be sufficent for my needs

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Connor, 


You can create a client account within your freelancer account and vice-versa. You can check the instructions listed in this article to help you create the additional account you need within the account you already have. 

If you need further help, let us know and our team will gladly assist you. 


~ Avery
Upwork
9e6861b2
Community Member

Hi John,

I went through this thready because I have exactly the same need as you. I am a portrait artist as well as a user experience designer and I cana't combine both of them. From the thread I sense this was discussion was not conclusive, still I would like to seek your advise on how you manage those here or anywhere else for that matter. Is there a platform that allows you to have multiple profiles. I am interested in something generic that can support diverse skills and not something very specific like the portal you mentioned for photography.

 

Thanks

Hi Navin,

 

I would like to confirm that freelancers are allowed to have only one account. However, freelancers can also create a specialized profile

 

With a specialized profile, you can tailor your unique skills to your audience on Upwork and create variations of your profile that showcase your experience within specific categories. Thank you.

~ Goran
Upwork
Latest Articles
Featured Topics
Learning Paths