Portfolio Basics
 

Why is everyone talking about portfolios now?

• For decades, artists, photographers, architects, designers and writers in search of work have used portfolios to showcase their abilities and their style.
• People in business and industry are re-discovering portfolios that can help them to fit into the current work environment, in which more individuals are acting as independent contractors, selling their skills and capabilities working whenever they can fill an employer's needs.
• Employees are finding that portfolios can help them with career transitions, because few can expect to work for one employer for an entire career.
• College professors and career advisors are realizing that the process of developing a portfolio can be an important learning tool for students to help them assess their learning and to compare it to the employer's need for skilled, capable employees.
• Students are discovering that portfolios offer a better way to demonstrate their work experience that adds value to the learning experience of their schooling.

Why is a portfolio worth the work??

It helps you:

• prepare for interviews.
• convince others of your skills, abilities and qualities.
• communicate clearly (finding your focus, focusing the interview conversation).
• showcases your skills.
• demonstrate the results of your work.
• establish the habit of documenting your accomplishments and results.
• create a personal data base.
• assess your own progress in your career development.
• see and evaluate the patterns in your own work preferences and values.

Want another opinion? Read this article: Preparing a Powerful Package of Skills and Abilities  http://www.jobweb.org/JCOnline/features/portrait/default.shtml
 

A portfolio is not a resume.
A portfolio may contain a resume.
A portfolio may be large or small, a few pages to 20 or more. (Fewer is better.)
A portfolio may contain colorful graphics.
Most people use the portfolio in interviews. They do not send them out unannounced.

What is a portfolio?     (Also see Starting Your Portfolio Collection)
A portfolio is a visual representation of your abilities, skills, capabilities, knowledge, qualities - it represents your potential.

Physically, it's a collection of things - artifacts - that represent work-related events in your life. (But, always remember that you may have developed skills that are now work-related while you were playing, while pursuing hobbies or team sports, or volunteer activities, or simply pursuing your interests.) The portfolio provides "evidence" of your potential by demonstrating what you accomplished in the past.

Artifacts
An artifact is any object/item that can represent your accomplishments and qualities in tangible form.

In the same way that archaeology reconstructs a civilization from artifacts, a portfolio reconstructs your work life from artifacts. In both cases, the artifacts are fragments that represent pieces of the whole.

Artifacts include:

1.) Work products you've made on the job. You could include reports, computer print outs, graphics, handouts, published articles, etc.

2.) Something you've created to summarize or "represent" things you have done:

• It could include a summary of evaluations from a workshop, a bar graph that shows rising sales figures, or a pie chart showing your contribution to a team.
• It could include a statement of your philosophy, or you could symbolize your philosophy by using an image or developing a collage of images.
• It could include a photo of you accepting an award (particularly if the award is an object designed to sit on a shelf.)

One size does not fit all
Because those skills, qualities and knowledge can come from so many different places, even the portfolios of twins would be drastically different from each other.

Self-assessment is important
An effective portfolio is a visual representation of all your strengths. This means that you can present both your skills/abilities (what you can do) and your characteristics/qualities that speak to work style (how you do it). Thus, you need to know what you do well and what you want to do. Self-assessment is a necessary first step.

A learning portfolio is not a professional career portfolio
The learning portfolio, as instructors and educational institutions use it, tends to focus on documenting the process of all learning that has occurred. (Students may be encouraged to include early, stumbling efforts that lead to more accomplished learning, for example, actual exams that range from poor to excellent, so the student's learning and improvement can be seen.) When you are focusing on learning, this is a good practice.

However, a professional portfolio focuses on the potential for accomplishing future, specific work. It is assumed that learning has happened. Employers are not interested in the learning process, but on those skills, abilities, experience, or personal qualities that relate to the specific work being discussed.

Not knowing the difference between these two kinds of portfolios and their purpose can be a problem for students who lug a 5-inch-thick notebook portfolio full of class projects along to an interview, thinking that their only goal is to prove that they have learned something - anything.

How do you develop a portfolio?
You start with a portfolio collection that contains all of your artifacts, but, much like a resume, you want to focus the portfolio, so that all the items are relevant to your audience and support your purpose.

If your audience is an interviewer (for a job), you'll want to focus the portfolio so that evidence of your ability to do that job is crystal clear. Your purpose is to demonstrate that you have successfully accomplished the tasks represented in the portfolio (which should parallel the job description), to support your assertion that you can do the job. Your choice of artifacts from your collection may be different depending on your specific audience and your purpose - i.e., showing the interviewer you can do that particular job.

(For what to put in a portfolio, see Starting Your Portfolio Collection)
 

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geogjobs@u.washington.edu                                                                                                                   This file modified: May 11, 1999

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