How To Present A Portfolio In An Interview
The 5 Steps To A Professional Presentation
1 — The Brief
“Talk Me Through One Of Your Projects”
State Your Brief:
Start by highlighting the brief for your project
Example brief = Create a new packaging design for a dog food company.
Explain Your Brief:
What is it? Where did the idea come from? Explain the background and put it in context.
- This could be a project for school
- An example from some work experience
- A real example from an old job
- It can even be made up!
Crucial Tip: — “Help I don’t have a good brief…”
In your spare time create a hypothetical situation for your work relevant to your industry!
The best case scenario is that you can present them a project they are interested in and prove you are too — because that’s what they are looking for!
Example 1: If you are applying for a corporate marketing position part of this role might be to design a company logo. That could be your brief, pick a company and state your brief as “Design a new logo for Munchies, the sandwich company”
Example 2: If you are applying for a job in creative advertising, “create a campaign to improve recycling among young people”.
Do some research!
Do some research into your industry and come up with a brief for an existing problem. If you are applying for a teaching role you might find some current hype in the media suggesting maths is the most difficult subject to teach girls. So give yourself a brief, “Plan a lesson to engage and excite girls as well boys in maths teaching”. Explain you saw an existing problem in the industry and decided to work on it.
This will really, really impress your interviewer.
You’ve done your research and you’ve applied it to your work…
How To Really Stand Out: Go the extra mile!
You can try going one step further in this by looking up the current things the company are working on and seeing if any ideas come to you from that. One step further again, you can find email addresses, or phone numbers of the staff (or even the interviewers) at the company and ask them! Ask them about any current problems in the industry. If you can get a fairly specific answer out of them and you turn up to the interview having already started work on a brief that the company itself are already working on it will look amazing!
2 — First Designs
Explain Your Plans
How You Got To Your Frist Designs:
Explain your initial thoughts and ideas, remember it’s quality over quantity — it is better to well explain one brief than skim over lots of them. So explain your plans in clear, concise and comprehensive detail. Then explain the first designs those plans lead to, how you went about designing them, did you use any technology?
Tell Them What They Want To Hear:
Remember the kind of skills you want to show them you have.
KEY TIP — If you have emailed to ask the company what kind of software they get the staff to use and you have experience using it already, the interviewer is going to go crazy for you.
If they email back and say they commonly use Adobe Photoshop, then work on your brief using that. Tell them how you got on with the software. Tell them what you’d like to learn more about, showing further interest in what they will be expecting you to do. Most interviewers will LOVE to hear from you and they’ll email back with huge clarity.
This goes for techniques in classroom teaching, it goes for marketing, it goes for fashion, photography, etcetera, etcetera.
3 — Problems/Feedback
Show Them You Are A Problem Solver
Spotting The Problem:
Explain any problems that arose from your first designs or plans. Companies look for people who can spot problems and people who can solve them. Show them you did both. Tell them all about the problems you identified, tell them all about how you identified them. Maybe you took your work to be looked at by a teacher at school who gave you feedback, maybe it was peer reviewed.
How To Stand Out:
How about going one step further again… Let’s say you had a brief for designing a logo for a small local sandwich company, a little shop around the corner from your house. Take it to the shop and get their feedback! If you are a teacher with a lesson plan, take it to a teacher to look at, or better still try it with someone of that age you know. If you have engaged with the customer as part of your project you will stand out a mile!
4 — Improvements
Act On The Feedback Given
Show Them You Can Improve:
Next, explain how you built on this feedback, explain the improvements you made. Make sure whoever you take it to knows you are looking for criticism, ask them to rip it to bits, you want to be able to make changes.
Remember everyone’s job is to meet the demands of the customer. If it’s teaching you are meeting the demands of pupils and parents, in graphic design you meet the demands of the company you are designing for, if it’s photography you meet the demands of the people in the pictures.
The Customer Knows Best:
Even if you take it to the shop around the corner and they tell you to change everything about it, you know they are wrong, you know your first designs are better. Do it anyway! The interviewer will see your first designs and recognise your ability but they will also see how you can adapt to meet the needs of the customer. This is the universal key to success, keep your customer happy.
5 — Final Product
Time To Show Off
Justify Your Final Design:
Show them the final design, or lesson plan, or photos, or whatever. Summarise the changes you made from your plan and justify why you have made them. Then to really knock it out of the park, show them overwhelmingly positive feedback from your customer.
Collect Feedback:
Get the little sandwich shop to write some feedback about your design and you, how professional, polite and accommodating you were. Get them to write how they’d be happy to work with you in the future. Have them sign and date it to put in your portfolio as the final cherry on your cake.
How To Work This Into Any Question:
It’s not just the generic opening questions that can be answered with this format. If they ask specially, “show me an example of where you have had to use software”. You go to one of your briefs, tell them the brief, quickly explain your design and then in detail explain the part involving software.
As long as you have your portfolio and brain arranged in that 5 step structure, you can’t go wrong. It will be so much clearer, professional and convincing to the interviewer.
How To Practice
The absolute most important thing you can do to prepare for an interview of any kind is practice. As well as presenting the portfolio you are guaranteed to be asked basic questions as per any interview.
Things like “why this job”, “what are your weaknesses”, “tell us about a mistake you made”… These are questions you have to get right or all the work you put in on how to present a portfolio will be wasted.
Follow this link to download our FREE template of over 50 classic interview questions!
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