As a professional with a 30-year non-linear career, my biggest regret is not having built a career portfolio.
This is something I am rectifying now, but I could have saved myself a world of heartache if I had done this sooner.
I always thought that career portfolios were only for creatives: graphic designers, artists, and photographers who needed to showcase their work in visual format to land more work.
I was wrong.
Career portfolios (or professional portfolios) are a valuable tool for anyone trying to navigate the new world of fluid careers, whether you are in marketing, business development, management, education, consulting, leadership, HR, finance, software, data, or any other professional role.
Regardless if you are employed, self-employed, or somewhere in-between, both employers and customers will perceive you based on what you can show them you have done.
It is a whole lot easier to have a record of your accomplishment stories and work samples at the ready, rather than trying to explain who you are on a CV.
What is a Career Portfolio?
A career portfolio is a detailed showcase of your achievements, along with evidence of these accomplishments, and the skills and experience you can confidently claim to have as a result.
My Personal Experience
When I first came to London, I unwittingly became just another struggling job hunter, applying for a bunch of different roles and hoping to land a job. Much like many others, sometimes I was ghosted and sometimes I landed interviews. But I never quite got the job.
One of the reasons for this was my inability to communicate who I was and what I could do. I knew I was skilled, qualified, and experienced enough, but because my career had been non-linear, it was difficult to express these talents in the context of a specific role.
If I had kept a career portfolio, regardless of whether my achievements took place when I was running my own business or leading an organizational department, and regardless of the industry I was in at the time, I could easily have shown my abilities to bring a vision to life, to build and lead teams, to craft new offerings and take them to market, and the number of times and different challenging circumstances in which I had done this.
This is called keeping a record of your accomplishment stories.
The Power of Accomplishment Stories
Without concrete proof, I had to try and explain years upon years of varying leadership tasks in the space of a few minutes, which is difficult to express to someone you have just met.
Accomplishment stories can be written down in a career portfolio in a S.T.A.R. format (a common competence-based interview technique) and ensure your readiness for S.T.A.R. (Situation, Task, Action, Result) interviews.
If all your accomplishment stories are documented soon after they occur and sit in your career portfolio, they are ready for you to showcase online or explain verbally.
Your interview preparation time can be cut by as much as 80% if you consistently keep track of and chronicle your achievements.
Combining Stories with Work Samples
Combine your accomplishment stories with actual work samples and your portfolio becomes powerful. There is nothing more convincing and confidence-inducing than hard evidence of what you have done.
This applies both to potential employers (if you are job hunting) and potential paying customers (if you are customer hunting).
A work sample could be a project you led, a process you initiated, a plan you executed, a person you helped, or a document you created.
If only I had kept all my work samples over the years, I would have a compelling portfolio of every program I had ever designed, every product and process I had ever created and delivered, and every article I had ever written.
The addition of testimonials to your accomplishment stories and work samples will further boost your portfolio. You need to be diligent about collecting these as you go.
Academic Recognition
Many educational institutions will recognize work evidence as academic credit.
Consistently building your own career portfolio doubles up as a portfolio of evidence that can save you many months of studying. (If only I had done this, I could have shortened the time spent on my postgraduate assignments dramatically).
Managing Career Goals
A career portfolio is also a tool to help you manage your own career goals. When you know what it takes to succeed, you can set yourself goals and focus on working backwards from these goals.
A track record of actions and results is what will make you stand out over the course of your career.
Knowing this can inspire you to create a list of things that you need to achieve, and then take steps to achieve them, in order to build your career portfolio and make yourself noteworthy in the marketplace.
My Current Journey
Now that I have started my career portfolio, it has made me see the experience and qualification gaps I need to plug.
As someone who wants to develop my standing as a careers and employability professional, I am going to proactively develop more employability-boosting offerings and programs, do more careers coaching, and add careers and employability to my continuous professional development studies.
Combined with my leadership, strategic, and entrepreneurship qualifications and capabilities, this will help me to shine as a professional with both hard and soft skills.
I will keep adding these initiatives to my accomplishment stories and work samples in my career portfolio, bringing my journey to life in a persuasive summary to anyone I need to sell myself to.
As I have been going, I have also noticed that developing a career portfolio has helped to reduce my imposter syndrome, where I felt self-doubt about my abilities. The more hard proof I have of what I can do, the better I feel about myself and the more my confidence grows.
Tools to Help
Using a career portfolio building tool such as WintheView can help you to consistently record your work. It can also help you set up a number of different versions of your portfolio when applying for different roles.
Conclusion
While a CV may be a good way to summarize your capabilities and get you into that first door, a career portfolio will tell your whole story and demonstrate your actual skills, work samples, experience, and results.
It’s never too late to start building your own portfolio. Take it from me, the longer you wait, the more you will regret not having one.
At ELE Hub, we are here to support you with your career and employability. Attend our upcoming event ‘Help for Career Changers’ where you will have the opportunity to ask top experts your questions and connect to practical experience opportunities.
