Great Upwork jobs for beginners (and how to spot them)

There are plenty of great Upwork jobs for beginners. You just need to know how to find them.

When I first stumbled onto Upwork, I was a total beginner — I’d never freelanced before, had no experience with the type of work that’s offered on Upwork, and I didn’t even have a college degree.

By applying a little bit of hustle and street smarts, I was able to find enough beginner-friendly jobs to pay all of my bills through freelancing, right from day one. (And even propel me toward my first six-figure year as a freelancer on Upwork.)

Below I’ll discuss the Upwork jobs I’ve found to be the most friendly and accessible for beginners, including specific examples from my own personal experience.

But, regardless of which one(s) you decide to try, it’s important that you start small. 

By that I mean, I recommend you look for relatively simple, straightforward jobs that you can complete in just a few hours, or maybe a day.

That will help you in a lot of ways. 

For one thing, it’s psychologically easier. Knowing you’re swimming in the shallow end of the pool will help you feel safe and protected, never in over your head.

It’s also best to be on the safe side in case you underestimate how long a job will take you. For example, if you think something will take about two hours, and it ends up taking twice that long, you’ll end up working just a couple more hours more than you planned — not so bad. But if you think something will take a week, and it takes double that amount, you end up wasting a whole week!

Another, often overlooked, reason why it’s better to start out with small, simple jobs is that it’s easier for the client to take a chance on you as a beginner when the stakes are small for them, as opposed to a bigger job where most would prefer to hire a freelancer with more experience.

So, for example, when I discuss something like creative writing, I’m referring to jobs that require, say, a few pages of writing — not a 200 page novel! 

And no, this doesn’t just apply to writing. The same principle can and should be applied to any type of work you’re doing. For example, a beginner graphic designer would be better off starting out with a simple logo design, rather than a full scale corporate rebrand. Regardless of the type of work you’re planning to do, I always recommend starting small.

Now, without further ado, let’s talk about the best Upwork jobs for beginners. Here they are, in no particular order…

1. Creative writing

Creative writing can be a good place to start as a beginner, as long as you stick to small, simple jobs.

My very first Upwork job fell into the creative writing category. The client was looking for someone who could write a bunch of very short children’s stories.

Now most people in my shoes would look at a job like that and conclude, “Well, I don’t have experience writing short stories, so this wouldn’t be a good fit for me and I should not apply.”

But I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. I absolutely saw it as a job that can be done by a beginner.

If you look at the job description there are some clues as to why. It sounded something like this:

We’re looking for someone to write very short children’s stories, about 700 words each.

The stories will all follow the same basic template: 

A young boy travels to a tourist destination with his parents and his beloved teddy bear. 

While he is there, he loses his teddy bear, wanders off to find it, and gets lost. This turns into a mini-adventure where he learns 3 cool facts about the place he’s visiting.

Finally, he finds his teddy bear, and is reunited with his parents.

As you can see, each story is essentially the same. The only thing that changes is the destination being visited, and the 3 cool facts Billy learns on his mini-adventure.

The first clue that told me this job would be beginner-friendly was the fact that the stories themselves were very short — 700 words comes out to just under two pages.

Another clue was the simplicity of the writing itself. It’s basically just following a template. I’d guess any high schooler could do it. So, I thought, why not me?

So, contrary to what most people might think, this sounded like a great job for a beginner like myself.

The client ended up hiring me, and paid me $20 per story. Since they were so easy to write, each one took me less than an hour to complete, which meant I was getting paid pretty well for an entry-level writer with no experience! I made $340 in my first week, and never looked back.

2. Transcription

Transcription is when you take an audio (or video) recording and turn it into text. 

I did a few transcription jobs as a beginner on Upwork and it went very smoothly. I even managed to get paid as high as $30/hr, which is pretty good considering how new I was.

I’ve developed an incredibly powerful system for doing entry level transcription on Upwork, which I’ll share with you.

But first a quick story.

Some years ago an Old Pro (my pet term for those cranky, insecure freelancers who try to scare beginners from entering the game, for fear of competition) laid into me in a LinkedIn group after hearing me recommend transcription as a good Upwork job for beginners. He insisted that I was being “irresponsible” to tell people that they could start out doing transcription with no previous experience. 

He even went so far as to say that my advice was “dangerous.” Maybe he thought that people would get electrocuted plugging in their laptops? I don’t know.

My point here is that I think he must’ve been unaware of the system I’d developed, which worked so well for me and the others I taught it to. 

I’ll share that system with you now. It consists of two steps:

Step 1: Listen to the audio

Step 2: Type out what you hear 

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