Career and Life Portfolios: A Tool for Any Age
Maintaining a portfolio of work samples has been essential for artists since the beginning of commercial art, and in the last couple of decades, that practice has spread to other fields. Today, schools nationwide are training students to develop portfolios that can be used to prepare them for academic, professional and personal success.
Why Is a Portfolio Helpful for Everyone?
• Portoflios provide an organizational tool for individuals to track and evaluate where they have been and where they want to go in terms of goals, interests, skills and achievements.
• It is an organized method to showcase accomplishments, experience and skills to potential employers (or clients).
• Once a portfolio system has been set up and becomes a habit, retrieval of important information is easy, making it unnecessary to waste time looking for important documents.
• A portfolio can help answer job, college or scholarship interview questions, such as "why should we hire you," "what experience have you had," "where would you like to be in five years," and "tell me about yourself."
A portfolio is not just a great tool to collect and store important documents, samples and personal information. It's also a great marketing tool to promote oneself! Portfolios allow job seekers to back up their claims of skills and potential with physical evidence.
Students will find it well worth their time to maintain a portfolio. Transferable skills are more easily identified. A visual collection of material, organized in a way that allows them to easily retrieve, review and update, helps them with their goal setting and transitions in life.
A person's portfolio will transform as his or her career progresses. In the earlier years as a student, it will include much more personal information, examples of progress, and assessments. As an individual grows, becomes more established in the workforce, the examples and demonstrations of work accomplishments replace school examples and progress. Personal references change to professional references.
However, people may be wise to maintain two portfolios: one to show a potential employer or college admission interviewer and one for personal use. The latter will include personal information, such as medical records and budgets. It might include personal plans goals that should not be shared with an employer.
Here are some of the items that students can maintain in their personal and professional portfolios:
Personal information (including optional picture, driver's license, vaccine schedule)
Educational plans
Sports activities
Work experience record
Community service
Resume
Samples of school work (writing, art, computer work)
Goal Setting, personal and professional
Letters of references
Assessments
Achievements and awards
Sample job application
School transcript, SAT/ACT scores
Budget
Interview planning
Networking planning
Calendars
Tracking system for applying for college and financial aid
Time management worksheet
What Format is Best?
Choices for portfolio formats include:
• Web-based, which can be a personal website
• Electronic, such as putting documentation on a CD or flash drive
• Paper-based, using a folder, expandable folder or binder
• A combination of the above
For most people, including students, a binder as the primary format works best. Including some type of portable storage unit, such as a CD that you can leave with the interviewer, is helpful if you have artwork, computer work, music files or a website to present. The portfolio as a whole should include anything that will help give a full picture of the person, where the person has been and what he or she has the potential to do.
Some of the items needed for the portfolio include:
3-ring binder, preferably with a plastic slip sheet cover
Sheet protectors
Dividers
3-hole punch
CD Sleeves and/or USB storage device (optional)
The Next Step: Collecting Documents and Organizing Them
For more information on developing a portfolio, see Do It My Way: Developing School, Career and Life Portfolios.