Turn Your Student Portfolio into a Job-Landing Asset
Yes, it’s that time of year, the moment when many soon-to-graduate master’s degree program students are immersed in assembling their student portfolios. It’s a grad school rite of passage, but with a bit of tweaking, that portfolio can also become an incredibly powerful job-landing tool for you.
How? Well, most of us have a tough time saying great things about ourselves in an interview. You don’t want to come across as a braggart, but on the other hand, you really did nail that last class project, creating a pretty terrific process that’s ended up being adopted by your local library. How can you convey that information with confidence in an interview situation, when you’re likely to be feeling nervous and unsure of yourself?
One great way to meet this challenge is to create something in advance, when you’re not feeling pressured or nervous. With a few tweaks, your student portfolio can easily be adapted to speak to your professional strengths, showcasing the best achievements of your graduate studies, describing them clearly and thoughtfully, and documenting them with supporting evidence in a professional e-portfolio.
What is a professional e-portfolio?
A professional e-portfolio is an online collection of digitized materials that provide evidence of your student and/or work and career achievements for a potential employer or client. A living document that grows along with your career accomplishments, a professional e-portfolio can be thought of as a career “highlights reel” that provides proof not only of what you know (your skills) but also of what you’re able to do with those skills (your value). If you’ve been working for a while it may also provide examples of the results you’ve achieved through those skills.
Essentially, you’re showcasing your past to prove your future potential.
E-portfolios function as marketing pieces working on your behalf 24/7, available for review by anyone (at any time) who might be researching your professional skills — including hiring managers, potential colleagues considering recommending you for a job, project managers, consultants looking for subcontractors, and others who’d like to check you out before reaching out to you. A strong e-portfolio might quickly convince them that you’re just the person for the great opportunity they’ve got.
If you’ve created a rigorous student portfolio that recaps your grad program learnings and achievements, then you’ve already done most of the prep work necessary to create a compelling, “hire me” e-portfolio. You’ve painstakingly created a record of your student accomplishments; add to that your professional highlights, and you’ll have a history of successes that boost both your confidence and your value to a potential employer.
Equally important, because you’ll now be updating your e-portfolio on a regular basis, it will help you keep your eye on just how much your career is continuing to grow — or not. (Time to take on a new project?) Bottom line: in multiple ways, a digital professional portfolio can be a terrific job-hunting asset.
What goes into your professional e-portfolio?
Your e-portfolio can cover three bases: grad school and/or work-related accomplishments, demonstrations of personal qualities and strengths, and selected non-work engagements that speak to your values and interests. Here are some of the items you might want to include in each area (but don’t be daunted if you only have one or two items from each category — these are just ideas):
Grad school and/or work-related accomplishments
- Your resume
- Write-ups of key projects (including course projects) worked on and results achieved
- Internships, apprenticeships, special projects
- Awards and acknowledgements, honors, honor society memberships
- Letters of commendation
- Independent learning (things you’ve learned on your own, outside of your formal grad school studies)
- Reports, white papers, articles, blog posts or other materials you’ve written as examples of your analysis/research/writing skills
- Samples of your professional area(s) of expertise (for example, a marketing strategy you created for your library’s new makerspace or the project proposal that landed you your special collections internship)
- Special training or certifications (for example, project management certification)
How much education-related material you include in this section will to a great degree depend on whether you have a substantial amount of professional or career-based material to highlight. The more work accomplishments you can document, the less you’ll need to rely on indicators of accomplishment during your grad school years.
Demonstrations of personal qualities and strengths
Narrative descriptions of times when you demonstrated, for example, skills in any of these areas (among others):
- Leadership (including leadership of student groups)
- Management
- Problem solving
- Conflict resolution
- Project management
- Creative or innovative thinking
- (Others unique to you)
Because these are more intangible, the best way to document this type of information is through brief write-ups similar to mini-case studies. (Essentially, a mini-case study consists of three very brief paragraphs identifying the problem you or your group faced, how you handled it, and the positive outcome. See how to use them in job interviews.)
Non-work activities
- Volunteer activities and/or leadership positions held
- Service project participation
- Public speaking or presentations
- Awards, honors and/or commendations
- Knowledge of other cultures, countries, languages
Your non-work activities can include items that demonstrate work-related strengths, as well as personal passions that you feel present a better-rounded picture of who you are.
Organizing your e-portfolio
Although each individual’s e-portfolio will reflect their unique career and education experiences, in general e-portfolios should follow a logical progression, with similar thematic materials grouped together. For example, you might want to have (in this order or in these categories):
· An opening statement page summarizing the key strengths you want to showcase — this can be brief, perhaps simply a couple of short paragraphs, or lengthier, depending on how much you’d like to share
· Your resume
· Key professional strengths and related accomplishments (this is where you provide documentation/write-ups for each strength and accomplishment or strength, preferably using the mini-case study format described previously)
· Publications, workshops led, major presentations given, etc. if applicable
· Additional professional engagements (committee work for professional associations, volunteering your professional skills for a nonprofit, etc.)
· Personal engagements (this is to further define and round out your personal strengths and values)
· Education
(If you’re currently a student or a recent graduate without much work experience, you’d probably want to reverse the positions of your resume and your education overview.)
E-portfolio online options
There are several ways to create an online or e-portfolio, ranging from the pretty easy and fast to the more technically involved (and time-consuming for the non-tech-savvy among us). But the organizing principle is to put key information where it can be easily found and perused (think tabs, categories, sections, formatting, etc.).
Social media platforms. LinkedIn is the primary option here for now, because it’s the social media platform most associated with professional branding (of which your portfolio is a major element). LinkedIn not only enables you to provide a tremendous amount of in-depth information about yourself, it is increasingly encouraging people to link documents to specific elements of their profile. You’ll have the ability to upload supporting documents, letters of recommendation, links to specific online information, photographs, screen shots, videos, etc. (For a great overview of LinkedIn’s e-portfolio options see “Get the Most from LinkedIn and SlideShare” from Hannah Morgan at Career Sherpa.)
The benefits of using LinkedIn for your online portfolio platform include 1) it’s free, 2) somebody else has to deal with all the technology issues, 3) every recruiter, hiring manager, or interviewer will check you out on LinkedIn anyway so you might as well showcase your best stuff there, and 4) yep, it’s free (hey, that’s important!).
The downside of using LinkedIn is that it has been known to offer options that it then takes away; the link to your website that had been there for three years suddenly disappears, for example. Although this is annoying, it doesn’t happen often enough to seriously offset the advantages offered by the LinkedIn profile platform.
Because Facebook was developed primarily as a social communication tool, it’s not as far along in terms of being a portfolio platform as LinkedIn is. However, it’s likely that users of Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media platforms may find ways to adapt the particular approaches of each to an e-portfolio format. The challenge will be, however, to convert what has probably been a social/personal profile into one that reflects primarily (if not solely) your professional persona. You may decide that you don’t want to give up the benefits of social engagement on these sites, and if so, then LinkedIn will probably be your best option.
Blogging platforms. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are two of the most commonly used blogging platforms, but there are now many free and fee-based options available to you if you’d like to experiment. (For an excellent Wordpress-based e-portfolio, see the one created by information professional Susanne Markgren.) A key point here is that although you may choose to use a blog platform for your online portfolio, you don’t necessarily need to actually start and write an ongoing blog as part of your portfolio.
Benefits of an e-portfolio
The foremost benefit of an e-portfolio is that anyone can see it and your amazing accomplishments at any time — for example, before they decide whether to bring you in for an interview. It speaks for you in a calm, professional, articulate voice without you even having to be present. It can say all those impressive things about you that you might hesitate to say in person and include others’ high regard for you as well.
Wouldn’t it be great to have something out there advocating for terrific career opportunities on your behalf 24/7? If so, time to start transitioning that grad school portfolio into a professional e-portfolio to help launch your career.
For more information about the benefits of adapting student portfolios to professional e-portfolios, see: Career e-Portfolios to Help Land a Job.
