Whether you wish to compliment your current full-time job with a lucrative side hustle or you’re a graduate student seeking flexible ways to earn money and gain experience whilst you’re learning, freelancing is a great way to gain real-world experience with flexible hours whilst earning some money regardless of whether you’re a seasoned Data Scientist or a noob.
I’m not sure how it goes for other professions, but landing Data Science freelance gigs are extremely difficult. Employers need to be sure they hire someone that can complete the task that is at hand. This doesn’t make it any easier for someone that is a seasoned Data Science professional for various factors such as cost, credibility, marketing, and more.
I started freelance Data Science work as a result of being made redundant in October, and since then it has been how I’ve sustained myself whilst I learned new technologies.
In that time, here is what I’ve learned:
1 Put Yourself Out There
I feel branding is important in Data Science as a whole, but for anyone that is seeking freelance work, it is imperative that you make an extra effort to effort to put yourself out there.
This doesn’t only mean merely making a Data Science blog or adding a few projects to your Github portfolio. You ought to aggressively seek out and apply for opportunities to land work when you are a beginning freelancer – again regardless of whether you have experience or not.
Not to contradict myself, this doesn’t mean having a blog/personal website or adding projects to your Github is not important, it is. Having a destination that potential employers can find the work you have done and assess whether your work is of the standard that the company desires is of high importance. Don’t neglect this and constantly add to it so that your page does not lay dormant.
Additionally, another way to put yourself out there is to tell people. I’ve spoken countless times about the importance of Networking in Data Science. I’m a firm believer in "if people don’t know what you need they can’t help you". Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help, and in saying that you’re not asking them to help you land a gig. A simple "Hey, do you know of anyone looking for freelance Data Scientist?" can potentially go a long way but you’ll never know until you try.
Note: Unless you’ve built that relationship, It won’t make sense to ask another Freelance Data Scientist if they know of any freelance gigs because it’s likely if they knew they’d probably take it on and if they didn’t they’d probably pass it on to someone they can vouch for.
2 Sit On The Shoulders Of Giants
For the most part, much of the things we do in life won’t be new, and fortunately, we aren’t going to be the first freelance Data Scientist ever to grace the planet.
Therefore, there are many people that have gone ahead and to reach the heights of some of the best people in the freelance arena you can simply replicate the way that they have done it.
For example, I follow a dude called Josh Burns. He’s a SQL Server DBA but in terms of the goals he’s attained on Upwork, I am super keen on replicating them on Upwork and as a result, I follow his work.
If you wish to follow his work to, here’s a full Youtube Playlist:
3 Be In The Right Place
You wouldn’t go to the jungle if you wanted to meet Drake or Beyonce. The chances of you bumping into Lionel Messi whilst you casually stroll around Mount Everest is quite slim, but if you go to Barcelona and hang about near the Camp Nou then your odds drastically change.
I will create a separate post for the best freelance platforms to land Data Science gigs, but for now, I will simply tell you that Upwork and Fiverr are known to be credible for freelance Data Scientist – I personally use Upwork for my endeavors.
Note: I would say that you shouldn’t count out the likes of LinkedIn if you’re active there. A number of my gigs have come directly from LinkedIn, but recently where I’ve decided I wish to have more structure hence I asked 2 of my clients if we could move to Upwork, and to my surprise they were already on there.
4 Determine Your Rate
I think this part can be the most difficult part for beginning freelancers because you almost don’t want to charge too much so that clients expect so much from you that you cannot deliver on and you don’t want to charge too little that you can’t maintain your own upkeep.
My take on this is to may be different from others.
I believe when you have no credible experience to reference or no source to provide positive references about client work you’ve done in the past then you’ve got to ignore the money aspect at first and focus on building up credibility with employers.
This may mean you earn a little bit less in your beginning days and I know people think this is lowballing yourself, but I am sure that in the long run, you’ll be much more grateful if you could accumulate many positive reviews on your profile.
Nonetheless, you ought to consider the skills you have to offer and cut your price given the context. For example, If someone wants you to teach them about Logistic Regression then charging $100 per hour doesn’t make much sense (In my opinion) and it’s likely someone would do it for less. Whereas, charging a client $10 per hour to do a full-scale end-to-end Machine learning project is not something reasonable to yourself.
5 Set Your Boundaries
Your boundaries are everything from your working hours to your working environment. You ought to do everything to ensure that you are as productive as possible when freelancing for instance ensuring that wherever you decide to work from has a stable internet connection as well as minimal distractions.
I’ve never been a fan of working in Coffee shops but if this is the only place that you can get work done in peace then, by all means, do what you have to do – just make sure you spend something in the shop each time you go or you’ll get angry eye by the staff if they don’t kick you out.
Having boundaries on the times that you work will allow you to program your mind to prepare for the work so that for those hours you dedicate to the task, your attention is engulfed by the work you’re doing. I also find it beneficial to communicate this to the employers so they know what to expect from you and can track your progress better – as you can imagine, communication is extremely important when it comes to freelancing and how you communicate can be the difference between a good review and a bad one.
Hopefully, you were able to get something from these tips.
