Last week I attended FreelanceCamp Pro in San Francisco, hosted by the offices of the newly open coworking facility of the main sponsor and organizer NextSpace. This event is based on a model of a BarCamp for freelancers and independent contractors.

If you don’t know what a barcamp is, this is a an “international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The day consists of sessions proposed by attendees and the schedule is created on site the morning of the event. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

This was my first barcamp, or unconference type of event I’ve attended and I must say it has been by far the most interesting conference I’ve ever participated. So much better, engaging and with great conversation than a the usual conference where someone on the stage presents his slides. I’ve learned many things and this post is to outline my takeaways from this event. Here are just the most important ones: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Guru.com launched their skill tests feature in partnership with ExpertRating:
“Skill Tests prove to Employers that you have the exact talent they’re looking for and that you are up-to-date in your area of expertise. When you receive 60% or above on a test, you can post it to the Skills section of your profile, and it will appear with an ExpertRating Certified Professional icon.”

Each test will cost ‘only’ $4.95 (and apparently this is the ‘discounted rate’)

This is rather late is you ask me as Elance had this for a long time now, and for free! Instead of trying to get more money Guru should have launched this as a free service, as I am not sure who would want to pay for this… I would have liked to see an external service like BrainBench (or even ExpertRating) integration with all these freelaning sites so you don’t have to take tests for each site individually.

Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively.

I have been using elance during the past 3 years, effectively helping me to build my freelancing career. Even now, since I am no longer actively looking for new projects, I am still rated as one of the overall top 10 individual providers (from a total of 34,121) – username net-force. I still have a few projects I am working on, and normally I am looking at elance’s new projects to see if there is something interesting and challenging to bid on . Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most valuable tools a freelancer can find these days is a good freelance marketplace site. Many successful freelances that were able to quit their daytime jobs to work as full time freelances have build their client portfolio from such sites. A few years ago there were not so many, but now you can find an ever increasing list of such sites that are trying to make their name into the business.

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GetAFreelancer (GAF) is what I would call a small freelancer marketplace site compared with major players like elance or guru. Personally I have never used GAF in the past because of their limited payment options (as I will not work on some projects and loose half of the money on site commission, and transfer commissions – like Western Union that was the only viable option for my country).

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