geographers:

getting jobs
planning careers
at work

portfolio basics

Why are so many professionals using portfolios now?

For decades, artists, photographers, architects, designers and writers in search of work have used portfolios to showcase their abilities and their qualities. Finally, others are now discovering how portfolios can help them in their careers.

• Portfolios can help people in business and industry move more freely in the current work environment, in which more individuals are acting as if they were independent contractors, selling their skills and capabilities whenever they can fill an employer's needs.
• Portfolios can help the already-employed 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 learning experience that adds value to their potential for specific kinds of work.

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).
• showcase 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.

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 their portfolio in interviews. They do not send them out as if they were resumes.

What is a portfolio?

A portfolio is a visual representation of your abilities, skills, capabilities, knowledge, qualities - and it represents your potential.

Physically, it's a collection of things - artifacts - materials - 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 team sports, while pursuing hobbies or volunteer activities, or simply pursuing your interests.) The portfolio provides "evidence" of your potential by demonstrating what you accomplished in the past.
(Also see Starting Your Portfolio Collection)

Artifacts

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

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.
Also see Information Ownership.

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 chart showing your contribution to a team.
• a statement of your philosophy, or you could symbolize your philosophy by using an image or developing a collage of images.
• 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 could be drastically different from each other.

Self-assessment is important

An effective portfolio is a visual representation of 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 "job" portfolio

The learning portfolio, as instructors and educational institutions use it, tends to focus on documenting the process of all learning that has occurred in a limited context. (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 can be very useful.

However, a "job" portfolio (ideally developed for interviews for a specific category of jobs) focuses on one's potential for accomplishing specific work. Also called a professional career portfolio, it assumes 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 they need to have done.

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.

What are the differences?

Clearly, learning portfolios and career (job) portfolios are parallel but different. Either can be contained within a person's permanent portfolio "collection," but they are not interchangeable. It is easy to imagine a student drawing examples for a job portfolio from the learning section of a portfolio collection, but the reverse is much less likely.

How do you make a portfolio?

You start by developing a portfolio "collection" that contains all of your artifacts, but, much like a resume, you want to focus the temporay portfolio you'll use for a specific event, 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 "job" 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. If your "audinece" is your current boss in your annual review, your "purpose" is to focus that temporary portfolio on evidence of your good work in that particular job in the past year.

Whenever you make a portfolio (for any specific, temporary event), your choice of artifacts from your collection will depend on your specific audience and your purpose.

For ideas on what to put in a portfolio, see
Starting Your Portfolio Collection

For online portfolio resources and examples, see
Portfolio Resources

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Geographers:

getting jobs
planning careers
at work