Creating a portfolio
For most of us students, it’s that time — time to start working on creating our professional portfolios! In the past few weeks, I’ve begun to take on the daunting task of starting to organize my portfolio. But if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right! Anytime I find myself face-to-face with a new endeavor that I’m not familiar with (or, as in this case, have NO CLUE about) I go in search of as much information as I can find. Well, I cast out my net over the wealth of information contained in the vast sea of the internet … initially didn’t come back with much. At all. But then I did some digging and found some pretty good stuff. So this post is for my fellow students, so the rest of you guys don’t have to look so hard.
The following is from an interesting site called Webgrrls International. Um, Josh, you might not get as much out of this site as the gals, but the portfolio advice is still relevant.
Preparing the print portfolio:
- Collect pieces from every job you’ve had. Sift through it all and put the best in your portfolio. These are the proof of your successes. If your success was less tangible, type it out on paper, explaining what you did and why it was so great, the challenges and so on.
- Show your portfolio to someone in your field that you respect and ask them to critique it. Implement their ideas, then show it to someone else.
- Prepare further by thinking of situations in which you demonstrated the particular skills an employer is looking for. Be able to give very specific, action-oriented answers with positive results. If you have any documented materials, add them to your portfolio.
I also found a good bit of information through Florida State’s Career Center. Here’s some helpful tips from the folks at FSU:
A Professional Portfolio is:
- A reflection of you as a professional person
- A record of your professional development
- How you perform/excel on the job or in the classroom
- What you have accomplished (i.e., tangible artifacts/evidence)
- Your efforts at developing new skills
Items typically found in most professional portfolios include:
- Resume or Vitae (ask a career advisor for information on Vitae preparation)
- Transcripts
- Evidence of professional affiliations
- Licenses or Certifications
- Letters of reference
- Evidence of specific skills (e.g., public speaking, leadership, writing)
- Work samples (e.g., class projects, items produced during internship or co-op experiences)
FSU’s site also noted two ways to organize a portfolio: chronologically and functionally. Chronologically, of course, means arranging the content sequentially. Arranging it functionally simply means grouping the material into sections according to the type of content (i.e., separately group together press releases, pitch letters, speeches, etc.).
Those two provided some basic information that was easy for me to pull out and offer as tips, but I’d also like to encourage you to take a look at this site on career portfolio basics. It has much of the same information mentioned above, and it details the difference between a “learning” and “job” portfolio. (Obviously, we want to prepare a “job” portfolio at this point in our lives.) This site is one of the better ones, it seems, just because there’s a lot of information in one place.
A few other sites:
Starting your career portfolio collection
Career portfolio resources
One thing I’m still not sure about even after researching … length! Some places say to make it only about 5-10 pages, while others indicate you should include a lot more. So I’m not sure on that.
I hope the rest of this was helpful! If anybody else knows of any other good portfolio resources or can offer any insight on the expected length, feel free to share.
(This was originally posted in Erin Caldwell’s PRblog.)