Starting Your Portfolio Collection

What is a portfolio?

"The professional portfolio: think of it as a collection in progress, a place where you store those things related to your training, work experience, contributions, and special accomplishments. It is the place to document all your work-related talents and accomplishments so that you have a good sense of your 'assets.'

As you gain a clear understanding of your lifework story, you'll increase your ability to see your potential and communicate it to others. This newly gained insight can assist you in assessing where you are on your career track."

                                                                                -from Portfolio Power by Martin Kimeldorf

An effective portfolio is a visual representation of your experience, strengths, abilities, skills - the things you like to do, and do best.

Just as there are different kinds of scrapbooks, there are wide variations in professional portfolios and in where and how they can be used. Here's a starter list of artifacts to consider. Begin your collection with whatever is relevant to YOU.

List of Suggestions

Start with who you are now. Collect all the important information about you. (The Personal Information list is a good basic collection to keep safe and available because it will save you time when you need to verify any of these documents for employment or other reasons.)

Personal Information

Education Activities Work-Related Activities Personal Qualities or Strengths -- Don't forget the activities that you might be taking for granted! (Especially if you're young or have little formal work experience)
For example:


Notice that some of the items on the list are actually physical objects. Others imply the existence of objects, and some are intangibles, like activities or personal qualities. You'll need to bring out the intangibles, by creating something to represent them visually. Having a visual representation of your accomplishment will give you an opportunity to talk about why you have included a particular item and what it represents in terms of your abilities.
 

Collecting Portfolio Artifacts

It's usually best to collect portfolio artifacts while they are being created, but it is not impossible to create portfolio items that "represent" your past accomplishments after the occasion has passed.

1)  At the time (artifacts made on the job / during the volunteer activity, or hobby)

  • Reports or research summaries
  • Training packets
  • Graphics for annual report
  • Sales percentage increases
  • Handouts from training workshops
  • Customer survey results
  • Published articles
  • Attendance records
  • Computer print-outs
  • Brochures, flyers
    • 2)  After the fact (representations of artifacts made at the time)
  • Resume, certificates
  • Pie charts of sales, bar graphs of savings
  • Collage of travel experiences
  • Title page of report written
  • Photo of award or you accepting award
  • Symbol that represents your philosophy, with text description
  • Newspaper clipping describing event you contributed to
  • Photo of product you helped develop.


    • Information Ownership

    When collecting artifacts to represent your past work accomplishments, include only items which you clearly own, or which you have permission to include. For example, if you have written a report while employed, your employer is normally considered the owner, even if you wrote it as a contract employee. Be aware that you should not be divulging proprietary information of any kind. Be especially wary of showing sales figures, computer programming or business development plans.

    If you are unable to get permission to use examples of your work, you should be able to (creatively) demonstrate your contributions. For example, try converting your sales figures into percentages. (My team increased the sales of our division by 37 percent - or - My program led to a 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction, according to our annual customer survey.) Visually, the figures could be represented by a pie chart, or bar graph, as long as it is not possible for a reader to take proprietary information from your display. You may be able to scale down a copy of your example to the point that the figures are not readable, but the concept of your accomplishment is visible. Or, perhaps, you could remove or cover the actual data.

    Students have a distinct advantage in this situation, because their writing, research and data manipulation samples from classes are clearly owned by them. However, students must be aware that they cannot freely make use of work they have completed during an internship or period of employment, unles they have permission from that employer (and it really should be written permission).
     

    To contact us:
    duttro@u.washington.edu
    geogjobs@u.washington.edu                                                                                                                   This file modified: May 11, 1999

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