I worked as a freelance engineer for some years. It can be a way to go broke, slowly. All of my work was word of mouth or existing customers who knew my work, so I didn't have to worry about bidding, but it's still a feast or famine business. Never used any kind of service. Around the time the economy soured and projects dried up (around 20 years ago), one of my customers offered me a full time job and I accepted it. But the flexibility of freelancing was good for awhile.

As far as needing a PE license, technically, yes, but it's not enforced and very few have a license. If you were designing bridges or such it would be more important. Rather than holding out as an "engineer", I offered "design, drafting, and CAD services."

The other problem is you're competing against every recent graduate living with his parents and running a pirate or student copy of CAD software part time in the evenings. They can't do the quality of work that an experienced engineer can, of course, which is why reputation and word of mouth is the way to get decent jobs.

 

I've been trying to get my foot in the freelance door, but I'm having trouble finding the right door. I'm on three freelance sites, but they all seem to want some one to design a house, or design something in software that I've never heard of.
I have a full autodesk suite, but everyone wants solidworks, and I can only access that at work.

 

I think it very much depends how you approach it. Yes, there are many (many!) low-quality and low-priced jobs but there are also many 'diamonds' amongst the postings.

You have to determine what minimum price is acceptable for you for each job and then stick to that. I've found that you have to compete on quality (basically do an amazing job, every time) rather than price. Over time you'll build up a reputation and the higher rates that go with it.

 

I work at Upwork and I did not know about this site.
Thank you very much IrinaKasper for the useful information, I will definitely look at this site.

 

I never used freelancer.com, but I have used upwork.com, it’s based in the US, has a very good and easy to use interface. It also has time tracker and stuff so you can easily put things into your log for the hourly work. If you ask me, honestly upwork.com is a trusted site/app. You can go ahead with this one.

Yes its true, freelance engineering work is actually a real thing. Usually available jobs are about designing or making CAD drawings or making a 3D printable drawing, etc. Many other jobs also include writing reports, matlab codes, data entry and ghost writing. But the engineering jobs are the well paid ones.

Its fun to do for practice and it also gives you a little extra cash. However, the first few jobs are hard to get, you need to work your way up by getting comments and recommendations. But once you get going, it’s pays not too bad, especially If you live outside the US and get paid in in USD.

There are fees though, you can set your hourly rate but upwork.com automatically would deduct 10%-20% from it as their commission. Still its better than nothing.

 

Yeah, it was pretty bad when their fee jumped from 10% to 20%, but I suppose you can build it into your rate.
The way I see it is that without them I wouldn't have this job at all, so 20% is like their Finders Fee.

 

I was just watching this video the other day. How people became millionaires by using upwork (that’s a freelance work software). So the video explains people who are really successful in freelance work were the ones who were very specific in their field. Specific to the dot. And they became so good at doing what they do that there were no competition for them at upwork. And also they would have one specific solution to a problem. And they would have many such common problems. And to every client they would offer the same service and the same solution. And it would earn them tones of money because they would be doing 10 clients a day or more.

Also they were so experienced that they would know exactly what would get them the clients attention. After reading this article I was thinking does this actually apply to engineering?

If I was very specific about my topic, lets say FEM analysis with ansys for carbon fiber composites. Would I be able to serve more than one client a day? Because I am sure that upwork cant have more than 1 client on this topic per day

What do you guys think?

 

Yes... to a point. Lots of my work is basically making enclosures - boxes - for circuitboards to go into. I could just use a template for each one, then just tweak the details.


I do think as Ahmedabdlehady says - a lot of it is about social skills. Or not so much social skills but the actual non-engineering skills.
Yes, lots of people can make an enclosure in CAD... but much more important is communicating well with the clients, sticking to deadlines, understanding the wider context of their requirements etc.

It's unbelievable how bad some freelancers (and 'proper' businesses) are at communication! I don't mean necessarily writing in perfect English, I mean replying in a timely manner and actually answering questions that they ask you!

 

I fully agree with this, it is very important to correctly build communication with the client and the level of English is not particularly important here. Sometimes communication is built immediately and you give the client all the necessary answers and sometimes not, you need to strive to interest the client and show yourself as a professional.



In the framework of this topic, I have an interesting question)

Who from the freelance engineers present here had major projects from serious large companies?

I mean companies such as Ford, Yamaha, Boeing, Google, Apple and other large companies.

If you have ever performed such work, how did you get it and what exactly did you do?

 

It's very rare that I work for very large companies. Usually it's small, 'one-man bands' or very small companies. I guess that larger companies have a much stricter framework set up for outsourcing (and probably already have a very large pool of talent to draw upon for any projects).