Any experience with freelancing platform Upwork?

[schoenbauer]

Dear board members,
does any one of you have any experience with the freelancing platform Upwork? If so, how do you use it? Which skills are you advertising? How many assignments are you getting? I'd be very curious to hear!

I'm thinking about offering my translation skills (German <-> English) there. And maybe also my "core" profession: solving crystallographic x-ray diffraction data.

[Allison]

Myy best friend is working full time through Elance which is become UpWorks.  She has several Fortune 500/100 clients that work with her.  She is in document creation, management and database creation.  Going on two years full time and ranked in the top 10 of all workers.

It did take her about a year to get full time but now she is turning down clients.  Her average wage is about $45/hr.

[startingsmall]

I started using Elance about a month ago and I've had pretty good luck so far. 

I'm mostly interested in medical writing, but the first two jobs that I took were totally unrelated photo essay assignments. They paid $50 each for about half an hour of work, so great pay... but I mainly did them so my profile would reflect two completed jobs and thus look a bit more 'legit.' I'm now working on a bigger project through Elance, writing a continuing education course for an online company. It's a legit (albeit small) company and the pay is very fair.

I've definitely seen some things that looked like scams, but there are plenty of decent offerings if you look a bit.