What to Put Into a Career Portfolio

A career portfolio is a collection of work designed to highlight your abilities and qualifications. The contents of a career portfolio should highlight your accomplishments and skills. It should be designed to help a potential employer understand the types of work you are able to produce. The portfolio should contain specific examples of your competence in the field.

Resume

A career portfolio must contain a resume. There are several different formats for resumes. A resume can be in chronological order or functional order. A resume in chronological order highlights skills and experience in date order. It contains a list of jobs you have had, including the date you began work and the date you finished work. It is typically organized with the most recent work experience at the top and older work experience at the bottom. Education and academic accomplishments are also highlighted on a chronological resume, with the most recent degree being listed above degrees you obtained previously. The education section can be at the top of a chronological resume or at the bottom, depending on whether you wish to highlight your educational experience or whether you are more focused on your work experience.

A functional resume differs from a chronological resume because it is organized around skills and talents as opposed to dates. A functional resume lists skills that you have, and below those skills you can include specific places you obtained those skills. The places you obtained those skills can be educational or professional or both. A functional resume may be best for very skill-specific work or technical trade. It can also be a better choice for those with limited work experience but with a wide variety of skills.

Applicants can have a standard resume in their career portfolio, or they can tailor the resume to each particular job they apply to. The right choice depends on the circumstances. If the majority of jobs are similar and require the same types of skills and abilities, a standard resume might suffice.

Specific and General Work Examples

A career portfolio should also contain examples of specific work that you have accomplished. This collection of materials can be general or specific. In other words, you can have a career portfolio that contains a specific set of materials that you do not change for each interview. This is appropriate if you are interviewing for jobs that require the same type of skills and abilities. You can also select pieces to include in your portfolio that are specific to the job that you are applying for. For example, if you are applying for a secretarial position, you may want to include samples of business letters you typed. This would be a good example of work for any secretarial position that requires typing business letters. However, if you are applying for a secretarial position in a law firm, and you have an example of a legal case brief you have written, you would want to include it for that specific job as well. This would be a different example of work than you would include for a specific job.

Each portfolio should contain some general material or examples that apply to all jobs. For example, the ability to communicate with others is a skill that is useful for almost every job. So, if you have a group project that you worked on and excelled at, you may want to include this project in your career portfolio as a piece of general evidence. Whenever you are in an interview that asks about your ability to work well with others, you can use this group project to demonstrate that you have this ability

Tailoring Examples to the Job

Most job descriptions include a list of skills required of potential employees. You should always review this list of skills and determine which material you have that demonstrates these skills. For example, if a job requires you to be proficient in PowerPoint or a specific computer program, you will want to include a printout of a PowerPoint presentation you created. If a different job specifies that you need a math background, you will want to include examples of projects you have done that require a math background.

Prior to going on an interview, you should review the list of qualifications and ensure that you have included one related example of each skill in your portfolio. You can organize this portfolio by skill. Any materials that are generally applicable to all jobs should be in the front and should be a permanent part of your portfolio. Material that is custom-tailored to a specific job can be inserted in a separate section of your portfolio, as you prepare for each interview.

Finding Examples of Work

The materials included in your portfolio can come from your academic or career experiences. If you do a project in school or obtain a certification in something, you can include that example of the project or the certificate in the portfolio. If you create material or projects at work, you can include this in your portfolio. If you perform community service and have examples of your work that demonstrate a skill, you can include these examples in your portfolio as well.

The key is to find material, from any of these sources, that is related to the skills. While you will not necessarily be able to find something that demonstrates each and every skill you have, you should be able to find something at least tangentially related that applies to each skill. For example, most jobs look for problem-solving skills. While it may be difficult to find a project that shows your ability to solve problems, you could include, for example, a report you wrote for work in which you selected an innovative solution to a problem. You could also include a project that you did for school that required innovative or out-of-the box thinking.

Any work that you select for your career portfolio should be truly representative of your abilities. You want to make sure the work is your best work, and is free of errors or unprofessional mistakes.

Organizing Your Portfolio

You want to make sure you can quickly access information in your portfolio during a job interview. Therefore, it is essential to organize your material in an efficient manner. The best way to organize the material is by skill. This way, when a potential employer asks you a question, you can quickly find the relevant projects that demonstrate your abilities in that area.

It is important to practice accessing information in your portfolio prior to a job interview. You do not want to be fumbling during your interview to find the relevant example of your work. You should practice flipping through your portfolio to find relevant examples, and you should be prepared to do this while the portfolio is facing away from you, since you want to make it easy for the interviewer to see the information you are presenting.