Defining and Developing Effective Career Portfolios

Defining and Developing Effective Career Portfolios

by Kate Duttro

This article has been provided by the Career Planning and Adult Development Network. Consider joining the CPAD Network and receiving all of the benefits that come from becoming a member.

Rik was pleased to have a job interview lined up. As a new geography graduate, he was just starting his professional career and he knew that he had to convince an interviewer that he could handle a job. He had heard that one of his former classmates had used a portfolio in a successful interview for an internship and Rik remembered making a portfolio for a GIS (geographic information systems) course he’d had, so he went back to the box of course-related “stuff” he had accumulated in college. He pulled out the GIS portfolio, paged through it and decided it was perfect, because the job requirements included map-related skills.
At the interview, when he opened the portfolio after the introductions and suggested that the interviewer would want to see his samples, the interviewer said “No, we don’t have time for that, could you just briefly tell me about yourself?” Rik wilted.

So – what went wrong?
The answer begins earlier than just at the interview with Rick and his “portfolio,” and we will pick up his story a little later and follow him through several career transitions as he learns to use it. (Rik is a composite of several students and professionals I have worked with or known of. All the descriptions are either reconstructions or plausible constructions of what typically occurs as individuals learn to develop portfolios, and are drawn primarily from the experience, ideas and comments of real people who have worked with portfolios in various contexts.)

Definitions
We can see that Rik has several problems to solve, including what a portfolio is and how to use it. The problem of terminology continues to plague portfolios and muddles the way we think of them. Too often, when “portfolios” are discussed, it becomes apparent only later that the discussants have vastly different ideas of portfolios and how they can be used. My purpose here is to offer a common language of portfolios. I’ll describe the various portfolios that I’ve seen and I’ll offer a broad terminology that can fit most kinds of portfolios as they are used by people to define and describe themselves.

Too many of us use only the blanket term “portfolio,” which doesn’t differentiate the full “collection” of potential portfolio materials from “special purpose” portfolios.

A portfolio collection is the main repository of artifacts that individuals may collect over the years, to represent themselves, their skills, abilities and knowledge (Fig. 1). Then, from that collection, materials that can be used to form special purpose portfolios can be drawn out each time an individual wants to represent his/her abilities, skills, knowledge, or achievements and successes (Fig. 2).

Special purpose portfolios can be used in many situations, and afterwards, the materials used in them can recycle back into that larger collection when the special purpose has been fulfilled. (two diagrams will be included here) Two kinds of special purpose portfolios are commonly used interchangeably – with unpredictable results. Career portfolios are special purpose portfolios used for the purpose of career advancement, in contrast to learning portfolios, that are used primarily in schools and colleges to help students and teachers to assess, evaluate and represent a student’s learning. (Other terms associated with learning portfolios are “assessment” and “evaluation.”)

Rik had started his portfolio in college by accident. He didn’t know what it was until a professor made it a requirement in a geography course on GIS (geographic information systems). At the end of his course, Rik’s “portfolio” consisted of a bulging 3-inch notebook that included maps he had designed or modified, a large amount of information collected during a team mapping project and various homework assignments.

After that course, Rik continued to collect related materials, and by the time he graduated, he had filled a file box with several notebooks and the results of numerous required papers and projects, including a senior project that derived largely from an internship experience. Unfortunately, his box of “stuff,” (merely piled in the box as he completed courses) was unorganized and difficult to categorize. Rik’s electronic samples were even more disorganized, existing as a long list of cryptic file names. His university file space (allotted to him as a student) was about to expire and he didn’t know how much of it was duplicated on his assorted diskettes.

Learning Portfolios and Career Portfolios
Rik’s GIS course “portfolio” fell into the learning portfolio category. Learning portfolios tend to focus on documenting the process of learning that has occurred in a specific context (such as a single course or during a fixed period of time). The primary audience tends to be members of an educational community with an interest in helping the student learn. Students may be encouraged to include their initial, awkward efforts that later lead to more sophisticated work, so the student’s improvement within an extended learning process is revealed in actual examples. Reflective essays are encouraged, in which students may explain links between their learning and the meaning it has for them. Learning portfolios are often quite long (30-100 pages), with detail-filled examples and many sections of text.

In contrast, a professional career portfolio, or an even more specific subset, an “interview” portfolio, tends to focus on one’s potential for accomplishing specific work. It is based on the assumption that learning already has occurred (and that accumulated information has become knowledge). The primary audience, an employer, is most interested in whether the interviewee can do the specific work of the job, and is most attracted by examples of skills, abilities, experience, and personal qualities that make that work possible. Interview portfolios are best focused on the special purpose of demonstrating that the interviewee has the necessary skills and knowledge for that particular job. They tend to be brief (6-12 pages), and thus limited in detail, but they may provide the impetus for opening a high-level conversation around the interviewee’s knowledge, skills and abilities.

At his first interview, Rik had mistaken a learning portfolio for a career portfolio, and when the interviewer saw Rik clutching the 3-inch notebook, he declined the opportunity to be dragged through it. Rik may have had more success had he recognized the difference between learning and career portfolios. If so, he would have carefully selected a few examples of his work that related to his ability to do the job in question, and one or two of his personal qualities that spoke to his motivation to work in geography. And, he may have waited for the opportunity in the interview to say, “Yes, I can explain what I accomplished during my internship, and if you’d like to see an example of my work there, I could show you one.”

Such a low-key invitation can be refused, but according to many users of portfolios, it seldom is, particularly when only a few pages are in evidence and the time commitment does not appear daunting. In fact, many portfolio users report that the demonstration of one example leads to another page, and another – until the entire portfolio has been viewed and all the examples discussed. In fact, the discussions often seem to lead to longer-than-usual interviews and expressions of appreciation by the interviewer for the high degree of preparation represented by the interviewee’s portfolio.

Organizing the Portfolio Collection
Because he could see and handle the paper in his file box, Rik began trying to organize the paper-based collection, first by course (geography, vs. English vs. biology), and then by form (papers, vs. maps vs. exams), but it still left him without an easy way to find specific items. After the first interview debacle, Rick sought out career advice, and was advised that functional skills categories would show clearly what he could do as an environmental geographer, which was the work he found most interesting.

A portfolio collection can be particularly useful for helping individuals to inventory their skills and, if kept updated, to track skills acquisition. Also, the organization and preparation of a portfolio, whether used in interviews or not, helps fix one’s skills and examples in mind, so they are more easily articulated verbally. To be used effectively in interviews, portfolios need to be short and focused on showing a match between the job requirements and the candidate’s skills and abilities to perform them. This is the point at which career advisors and consultants can be the most useful to clients who need help with portfolios, as very few among us can effectively articulate our skills.

When he revised his career portfolio categories to parallel the job requirements (skills) of environmental geographers, Rik was pleasantly surprised to discover that he had several samples that would demonstrate his skills in mapping, report writing, and environmental sciences, as well as in public speaking and presentations, all of which were listed as required or desirable skills for the two positions he wanted to apply for. (As with many recent graduates, Rik simply had not thought of himself as a nascent professional, with a coherent set of skills that could be demonstrated. This new perspective also gave him a far greater self-confidence in his own abilities.)

Skills Categories
As we see Rik struggling with a way to organize his course-related college “stuff,” we see that he is working with a broader “collection” of portfolio materials that includes several learning portfolios and artifacts from assorted reports, projects and an internship. We can see that it may help him to organize the entire collection in the file box into functional skills categories that parallel the skills requested in the kinds of jobs he is most interested in. With skills categories, he will find it easier to organize the smaller, special purpose “career” portfolios, which he can use to help describe himself in job interviews or other career-related situations.

Two positions that Rik applied for (both titled “environmental geographer”) gave unusually complete job descriptions and requirements, so he decided to use them as a focus for his “environmental geographer career portfolio.” However, as he progressed, listing the job skills required and their relative importance, it became apparent that his interview portfolios should reflect the differences in the two jobs.. One job required well-honed GIS skills, as well as a great deal of analysis and report-writing (to map and describe areas potentially in need of environmental clean up), and the other job focused on explaining the why and how of environmental clean-up to adult groups and public school classes, with a background in mapping as an adjunct skill, desirable but not necessarily at a sophisticated level.

For the first job, Rik focused on the most sophisticated maps he had worked with, and he even revised one, based on comments from his instructor, and he used a just-released GIS program. He revised and included the more analytical parts of his senior thesis to demonstrate his report-writing capabilities. For the second job, he simplified a map from a GIS class and slightly revised a presentation he had made for his brother’s Boy Scout Troop, both focusing on a nearby environmental clean-up site.

Focusing on Skills
Again, Rik is illustrating a principle with career portfolios – by focusing on what he can do with his current level of skills, not only what they were last year. Knowing the difference between a general portfolio collection and a targeted, special purpose (interview) portfolio allows Rik to exploit the difference, to show his most recent skills, not just his past inventory.

Rick’s interview portfolio also allows him to show his ability to solve problems, so that the stories of how he solved problems in the past, by adapting ideas or inventing new possibilities, are still important, even if the technology he used then has been superceded by new.

Rik decided which of his own functional skills related most closely to those necessary to the job, and how he could represent them with examples from courses or his internship. He also thought about what personal qualities he had that would be useful, and he chose specific examples that showed him using these functional skills at a high level, such as the time he held a group project together by negotiating with two class members who had disagreed with the group and were refusing to participate.

When using an interview portfolio organized around skills, Rik also is demonstrating that he has analyzed the functional job skills desired by that employer, by focusing on those skills in his interview portfolio. Knowing what personal qualities would be useful in the job, allows him to respond with relevant information about himself. The ability to do that kind of analysis and to synthesize an appropriate response, is itself valued by employers, and is more easily done when one has a portfolio collection that can be mined for examples and information on one’s skills.

Formatting the Career Portfolio
Rik’s career advisor had suggested Martin Kimeldorf’s “Portfolio Power” and Carrie Straub’s “Creating Your Skills Portfolio,” and Rik adapted many of their recommendations for his own special purpose portfolios. He began each interview portfolio with a title page, followed by an introductory page that contained a statement of purpose (sometimes called a “mission statement”) and a table of contents that listed the title of each succeeding numbered page.

Each page contained a graphical representation of one of his skills/abilities that was used in a recent project. A title and caption explained why that particular example or graphic was there, and its significance in relation to Rik’s skills, which, in turn, related to the kind of work he was seeking.

A minimal, physical description of Rik’s portfolio:
The design/format of each page is consistent throughout and each page is titled, has a graphic and a brief page caption explaining why each item is included. Each item represents a story that shows him developing or using a skill required or desired to the job in question. The interview portfolio is short (4-10 pages), and each skill represented is easy to find because the numbered or tabbed pages are listed in the table of contents.
Choosing Appropriate Technology
Rik had re-organized his computer files, filing them in folders under several skills categories that make sense to him. And, because the file names were too short to recognize months or years later, he made a detailed index for himself in a common word-processor program, so it would be easier for him to find specific projects and reports later. Because the files took up hard disk space, he burned a CD-ROM of the index and all of his skills files, so he would have at least one secure copy of his work that he could draw on for producing his own website. He later made it a habit to post his current special purpose resume on his website before going to any interviews or information sessions, although he always took along a paper copy, to be prepared for situations where paper was preferable. The firms he dealt with usually were technologically savvy, and in many cases, interviewers would want to see his online portfolio, or on occasion, they had seen it, as he always listed the site URL on his resume.

As with most of us, Rik has to deal with the dilemma of technology. No matter what technology is available, it will change, and no matter what technological skills anyone has, there will be a higher level to attain “tomorrow.” Consequently, the technological level of any portfolio will vary according to the time, money and effort any individual has to invest, and all of those variables will influence the format of the resulting portfolio products. Some will be capable of creating digital graphics and posting and maintaining their portfolios online; others will be happy to cut and paste their portfolio materials on paper. In both cases, the organizational and reflective process involved in inventorying one’s skills and developing a special purpose portfolio is inherently valuable and should be encouraged. While technological skills also are to be encouraged, the potential benefits of a career portfolio should not be restricted to the digitally-capable.

The value of posting career portfolios online (outside the context of freelance writers and web designers) is still largely uncharted. It is probably more common among students than any other identifiable group and will become more common as time passes, as uses and knowledge of the technology become more generalized in the population.

I have spoken with employment recruiters on both sides of the online issue. Those against say they don’t have time to look at “student work,” indicating that they have seen less than well-organized examples in what were probably unmodified learning portfolios put online. Unfortunately, few students know enough to maintain a strict separation between personal and professional parts of their website, and few recognize or have the time to attain the quality standards common in the business community.