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Learning How to Create a Career Portfolio is an important and valuable exercise. With only a little bit of additional work, you can create a portfolio of your work and experience.
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Introduction
Creating a professional portfolio is an important and valuable task. Required by graphic designers and artists, regularly compiling highlights of your professional work can be important for any industry.You will need:
- Permission from your employer
- A document scanner and a Digital Camera
- A dedicated, reliable storage device such as a USB Flash Drive. Alternatively, you may choose to use online storage in place of a USB Flash Drive.
What to Include In a Portfolio
This video from Internmi describes what items to include in your portfolio along with why a professional portfolio is important.
Step 1: Add Portfolio Contents Regularly
Keeping your new portfolio updated is the single most important step. People often forget important details of work that they have completed or worse, forget entire tasks. We get busy, involved with other tasks and say to ourselves, "I'll update my portfolio with this later".Creating a simple reminder and updating regularly can solve this problem.
The free scheduling website, superminder.com (http://www.superminder.com/) is a fast and easy solution. After signing up, you can quickly tell the service to send you a reoccurring note that it's time to update your portfolio.
I suggest that you set the service to remind you once every 3 months. While I sometimes make additions to my portfolio after a large successful project, 3 month intervals seem to work well.
Step 2: Collect Your Portfolio Examples
Regularly consider what tasks you have completed since your last update. I find that compiling a list of successful and interesting items from my task list is an easy and effective way to accomplish this. However, it's important to keep an open mid and consider items outside of your task list.Storing all of the examples and items that you have compiled digitally is important.
- Use a document scanner to digitize written examples.
- Take photographs whenever possible. For portfolio elements that are difficult to exemplify in any other way, sometimes a photo works well even if the photo isn't of the exact event or item. Similarly, video can be invaluable.
- Create copies of digital documents, programming examples, etc.
- Don't forget client, employee and employer accolades. If someone email's you saying that you did a good job, hold on to that and attach it in your portfolio.
It is important to realize that many companies have strict confidentiality and information protection policies. Talk to a Human Resources manager or employer about your portfolio. Explain that you're keeping the portfolio to measure your personal growth at the company.
Step 3: Display Your Portfolio
One of the easiest ways to display a portfolio is by creating a fee, private blog on blooger.com. This allows you to store and display the contents of your portfolio, organized by date along with the multimedia (photo, video and audio) elements that will help your portfolio to shine.If you don't want this information to be stored online, using a USB Flash Drive (aka: Memory Stick or Memory Key) can solve this problem. Portable and secure, a dedicated, inexpensive flash drive can be a secure solution.
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Your Job Skills Portfolio: Gaining an Edge in Job-Hunting
Career experts are encouraging job-seekers to develop a job-search or career portfolio. This article shows you how to create a superior portfolio.quintcareers.com