Your Portfolio: Choose Wisely
What you didn’t know about your portfolio
This is a repost of an article I published on my blog last week.
If you’re interested in reading more from me, feel free to check it out.
As a freelancer / contract worker / company it’s indisputable that you need to have some projects to show your potential customer in order to build trust for your business relationship. How should he know whether you are the right person to solve his problem? Trust is the basis of all working relationships - and not only in business ;-) - so this is where your portfolio can help you a little.
The projects you list in your portfolio will have a strong impact on your future projects.
That sounds very obvious, doesn’t it? But they might even have a bigger impact on your future projects than you think. Beginners often make the mistake of putting every project they have into their portfolio. This is not optimal even if you’re short on projects.
What only few people know, but in my opinion is very important:
Your portfolio will attract similar project requests
Why? Because potential customers will see your projects and think “Hey, (s)he’s done that? That’s great, I have something similar to solve and obviously (s)he’s capable of solving it!”.
This is why you should carefully select the projects you put in your portfolio (even if you’re short on projects, which is usually the case when your starting freelancing/contractor career). Think about whether you would work on a similar project again. If the answer is yes, put it in your portfolio ;-)
With this knowledge in mind we can strategically use our project portfolio to get exactly the work we want.
Work that is interesting, motivating, and fullfilling.
Summary
- Don’t stuff your portfolio with every project you created, it makes it harder to find out what you’re really interested in
- Add projects to your portfolio which you would do in a similar way again. Your portfolio primarily attracts similar projects.
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