Trending Engineering Services
Increasingly more engineering professionals are selling their skills to the free market nowadays. They’re stepping away from the bonds that restrict them to one corporation and the rules and regulations set by that firm.
The pros of freelancing online are enticing:
- Schedule your own hours,
- charge a price you think fits your level of expertise,
- and you can pick and choose projects that are interesting to you.
Depending on the nature of your work, you could work from home too instead of being bound in an office from 9 to 5. If you’re an engineer who’s planning to be a freelancer as a side hustle or even want to make it your main source of income, we’ve got some amazing tips for starting out on your own as a freelance engineer.
Depending on which engineering field you belong to, there are top 4 Trending Engineering Services paths you can pursue, we’ve enlisted only a few to give you a head-start. At the end of this blog, you’d find some useful tips on how to be successful as a freelance engineer (like which platforms to use, how to start etc.) that are applicable to all engineers.
Trending Engineering Services
- Freelance Civil Engineers
- Freelance Structural Engineers
- Freelance Mechanical Engineers
- Freelance Software Engineer
Freelance Civil Engineers
If you are a civil engineer, you have plenty of options to launch yourself as a freelance engineer on Upwork or Fiverr. For civil engineers, one of the most in demand freelance services is the computer aided design (CAD). If you can use Auto-CAD, Revit, 3D Max or a similar program to create models, plans or drawings, you would be surprised to see there’s so much work for these categories.
However, it’s recommended to compile a portfolio first, showing your any sample works done using the software mentioned above. You should show a portfolio even if you haven’t done any real work before.
Since jobs related to these skills are so frequent and abundant, you should be able to easily win some contracts as a beginner to lay a foundation for your profile. You could start by accepting some easier or low paying works for a fresh start as it will help build your portfolio along with earning some great 5 star reviews as well which will help you gain trust of the next client.
Freelance Structural Engineers
City planners, Real Estate Developers, construction contractors and residential homeowners regularly need services of structural engineers for their construction projects.
Though these projects would need you to be familiar with local building codes as per the regulations, however, if you’ve read the local building codes then you can get these works as ghost designer. For instance, people who’re extending their homes or building adjacent cabinets would need structural design reports before going for remodeling of their houses as per their local authority regulations.
Apart from the short-term projects posted online, if you’d like long-term work, cities and municipalities need contractors to design projects, contract with them. So, you’d get a lot more projects then, instead of simply relying on freelance websites.
Freelance Mechanical Engineers
In today’s era, the skills age, every field has some aspect of online work because wherever computers is used it has the possibility of online work. So does the Mechanical Engineering. It’s not only used in mega corporate level industries like oil and gas, mechanical engineering is used in small products as well. These products need to be designed and analyzed first before manufacturing. This is what you can do online, you can provide services for product design using software. Drawings of these products for manufacturing, their stress analysis etc. this is all posted online, and freelance engineers provide services for these gigs. Start by providing services for software like ANSYS, MATLAB and Solidworks.
Freelance Software Engineer
Got tired of reading the boring blog? We saved the best for the last. Of course, we’re talking about software engineering. This is one of pioneers in freelancing world and yes you guessed it right, the most selling, with most projects field. One can say this is the best option out there for freelance work.
You’re a software engineer, viola, you’ve hit the jackpot of freelance engineer opportunities and an unimaginable growth. If you search for only the word ‘freelance’ on any freelance platform, you’d see hundreds if not thousands of results for software engineers without even mentioning the keyword software engineer.
Build a portfolio on GitHub for all the codes you have written and refer it to your clients, software houses and on your profile.
Freelancing Tips and Tricks
As you have seen in above screenshots, some of the freelancers have become Top Rated Plus in only a few orders, that means they earned at least $10,000+. That means, the market is unsaturated, the skills are in demand and high paying. After you have decided which services to offer, your very next step should be to create profiles online and start bidding.
For more tips please check out our other blogs as well.