On January 14th, 2025, I received a strange email from Upwork that I first subjected being a hoax: “Upwork’s Expert-Vetted Talent Badge: Interview Invitation.” As I hadn’t done many gigs there for a year, it raised my suspicion.
Yet, I opened the email… and it turned out to be legit! It came from notifications@talentservices.upwork.com and the person sending it was easy to find on LinkedIn. I could receive the most “honored” title, since according to the email “Expert-Vetted is the highest-tier badge on Upwork.”
A perfectly legit invitation from Upwork’s staff.
Right.
I wasn’t very enthusiastic. Long long looooong ago I’ve been saying that the badges don’t make much sense and that Top Rated remains by far the most prestige badge that clients can understand!
The badges, in their simplicity, are ranked as:
- Expert-Vetted: Qualifications seem to vary
- Top Rated Plus: More earnings than Top Rated freelancers
- Top Rated: About $1,000 every half a year or so
- Rising Talent: Spend a few Connects to apply for gigs without any need to complete a single gig!
Now, which of these names looks good? Only Top Rated, in my opinion. That additional Plus makes it look borderline funny. Several of my freelancer friends tell me that once they got promoted from Top Rated to Top Rated Plus, their profile views dropped! Hahaha, how’s that for a prize for “progressing” in the Upwork’s ladder of badges?
The funniest thing is, that freelancers A and B in the same industry category could have entirely different badges, rates, and overall outlook. Freelancer A could be an Expert-Vetted talent with a $15 hourly rate who worked her way through loads of small projects just to earn the badge. A hundred peanut jobs worth a few hundred bucks each.
Freelancer B could be “only” Top Rated with an hourly rate of $200, a bit like me, the smallest gig being $3,000. Now, which one looks more competent to you?
Let me give you six strong reasons why Expert-Vetted on Upwork doesn’t make much sense from a freelancer’s business point of view. It’s all about how you market yourself on the platform. Plus one more thing.
1. Let badgers be!
First (and most importantly): Leave badgers alone! They are perfectly nice animals that don’t need any of this mockery! (Honey badger might be an exception, though, hahah.)
Then there’s this thing called ‘badgering’ which is also related, but let’s not get stuck with these nuances. My point is, that the way Upwork has implemented its badges is somehow related to both topics I just raised. 😉
Honey badger is badgering.
The picture is unrelated. Thanks, DALL-E.
Let’s try to get to the point now.
2. Clients don’t get it
The only thing any freelance platform does for freelancers is that it connects us freelancers with new clients. Old clients don’t care what badges we have, and new clients don’t understand what badges are out there, which one is the best, and whether Rising Talent is, in fact, better than Expert-Vetted!
I’m not joking here! I asked several Expert-Vetted and Top Rated Plus freelancer friends to check with their clients if they noticed their badges. All four of those friends reported that the clients had no clue! Either they didn’t pay any attention to the badges in general (common), they didn’t know how the badges were ranked (more common), or they simply didn’t care if someone had a badge or not (most common)!
What the ranking between the badges is might as well be a question in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for all they care.
Almost all clients have no clue about how the badges are ranked.
Here we go. If you’re a freelancer who likes to chase badges like a true honey badger and wear them on your uniform across your chest… stop it! Even if it feels good to have some “recognition” that most freelancers don’t get (since 50% of Upwork freelancers don’t earn even a penny), you probably won’t notice the business impact.
The only potential change is from not having a badge or having a Rising Talent badge to becoming Top Rated. That jump might help you do something better than before as you gain some perks, but that’s about it.
And let’s also keep in mind that when Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted were first implemented (so many years ago that I don’t remember), both of the new badges were displayed as Top Rated to clients! So, you can imagine how much design effort, logical reasoning, and knowledge of how freelancers actually market themselves were put into this originally.
Not much.
3. It just sounds so bad!
Just read it. “Expert-vetted”… vetted by whom? It is as if there were bigger experts on Upwork’s internal team than a highly specialized freelancer like me. If the one vetting me, for instance, wasn’t in the field of Virtual and Augmented Reality or if she was but hadn’t even done her Ph.D. yet, why would I need to entertain her for even a single minute in this “vetting” of hers? What would we be talking about during this vetting?
Or does it mean some random guy “vetted” the freelancer to be an “expert”? By what criteria and are those criteria relevant to the freelancer’s clients? Either way, the word “expert” doesn’t look so good when everyone else calls themselves experts anyway.
And then there’s the root word: “vet”. I can only think of cats and dogs here. So, no “vetting” or “petting” or anything like that for me. Thank you!
Say no to vetting. Like any normal dog.
4. Stay at the “Top”
“Top Rated” remains the simplest, easily understood badge the platform offers. If you have this one, stick to it! If you don’t yet have it, try to get it (I’m sure you can do it, the bar is pretty low). As mentioned, it’s the only meaningful “promotion” on the whole platform, still!
The requirements are total earnings of a little more than peanuts on the platform, a mere $1,000 in most talent categories. It’s simply THE BEST BADGE! As I’ve gone through a massive career of good gigs that started in 2015, and I was Top Rated from Day 1 of the modern Upwork, I can tell you and prove with my track record that you don’t really need any other badge.
The only badge that actually makes a positive difference.
Stay Top Rated if you can. No less, no more.
5. Only Upwork users see the badges
Outside the Upwork platform, let’s say LinkedIn, or whatever social media platform you prefer to use to hunt clients, all Upwork badges are meaningless. They relate to nothing that is commonly understood without the context of Upwork as a freelance platform.
I pity those freelancers whose LinkedIn profile titles start with “Top Rated Plus Freelancer on Upwork” or the same with Expert-Vetted. No future client outside Upwork understands what it means!
Even outside Upwork, Top Rated is the only badge name that sounds somehow good even if you’ve never even heard of Upwork. It’s the only common-sense expression that uses language every English speaker gets. Correct?
How clients outside Upwork see Upwork badges.
Now, if you want to showcase your talents and market yourself effectively outside Upwork, there are far better ways of doing it. You can give yourself whatever badges you want, so these Upwork badges are only relevant inside the Upwork ecosystem. Remember that.
I remain CocoLord, CocoLord, CocoLord, and CocoLord. (Open each link in a separate browser window to see what I mean!) No freelance platform could ever give me a better title, my freelancer friends (peers, coachees/mentees, and book readers) gave me that!
A personal brand like this surpasses all platforms. Now you get what I mean, right?
And if you really want to have a badge, get something that is commonly recognized! Let’s say you’re a software professional. A Microsoft MVP title might be a huge title that someone else, one of the leading and most well-known companies in the world, gives to a very small bunch of people. That would count for something! Getting that badge is a huge honor less than 1% of top IT professionals are even considered for.
Upwork isn’t quite on this level yet. It is just a freelance platform with no experts on their team that others would look up to as people who issue titles and badges. Think of it as a competition between receiving a Nobel Prize in physics versus getting an A in a high school physics exam with an honorary mention and a tap on the shoulder from the teacher.
In this analogy, a Nobel Prize is something everyone in the civilized world has heard about. And will hear about it once you receive it! It’s publicized heavily in all media worldwide the minute it is announced. But in the case of an Upwork badge, only the classroom, i.e. your freelancer peers, are the only ones who hear about it or understand its significance.
(The same thing goes for certifications too, BTW. So, if you need a good one, stick to the industry leader-issued certifications. Upwork’s ones are an equally good joke as their badges.)
6. Don’t you remember the June 2024 sale…
The last straw is this: In June 2024, Upwork urgently needed more revenue before the end of Quarter 2. So, in their massive brilliance, they decided to sell their most prestigious badge!
It’s no joke! Before July, freelancers could spend 300 Connects to buy their way into the interview that starts the expert-vetting process. Best of all, there was no guarantee that you’d actually get the badge even if you spent those $300 Connects = US$45.
And the other side of the thing is massive inflation, obviously! How valuable is “Upwork’s most valuable badge” if you can just buy it for $45? Well, I tell you. It’s worth exactly $45! 🙂
The effort required to earn it becomes meaningless.
My LinkedIn post killed Upwork’s plot with 5 bullets, each hitting the bullseye, and I estimated might have saved at least 3,900 Connects for my followers. Probably much much more.
Jonathan Haas, who earned (not bought!) his Expert-Vetted badge years ago, helped me to clarify the benefits of the badge.
Jonathan Haas demonstrates all the benefits of being Expert-Vetted.
A complete list of the benefits after clicking ‘More’.
Thanks, Jonathan! 🙂
I rejected Upwork Expert-Vetted badge and I’m proud of it!
So, I hope that you don’t fall for stupid badges that only make you look worse! You don’t actually need it. (Nor do you need JSS to be 100% all the time, for that matter). No future client of yours cares… unless it’s another Upwork freelancer! Yeah, that’s the only exception I could think of.
Now, you should be only thinking of one thing: If the Top Rated badge is the only truly useful badge on Upwork, how can I get one?
It’s pretty simple: Look at the complete example, the exact blueprint of how I did it, and how I yanked up my rates from $30/hr to $300/hr. My e-book is the most comprehensive guide to freelancing on Upwork ever written.
Enjoy reading, forget the badges, play your own game (not Upwork’s), and enjoy coconuts responsibly. 😉
