How To Create A Digital Portfolio to Advance Your Career
We’ve talked before about the importance of keeping track of your accomplishments, but knowing your successes is only half the battle. You also have to be able to share your work with potential employers, and sometimes, enumerating them during a job interview isn't the way to go.
Designers and writers often have professional-looking portfolios, both online and offline, that showcase their work and successes. But what if you are not inherently a creative professional? How can you show off your work and visually demonstrate what you do?
Creating a digital portfolio allows you to send a link to a prospective employer or interested individual to show off the work you've accomplished. It can be as robust as a full-on website like Squarespace, as hip as a newsletter on Substack, or as simple as a profile on Medium with links to blog posts you've written.
Here are some ideas for what you can put in this digital portfolio to advance your career:
What to include
Obviously, if you are a content creator at your organization—blogger, video producer, photographer, designer—you can easily figure out what to include in your portfolio: e-newsletters, blog posts, videos, photo displays. But what if your job isn’t as visually appealing?
If you’re on the events team, document your activities with photos and collect news articles or blog posts about the functions. If you handle social media activities, save exciting and engaging Instagram conversations that you moderated, or posts that did really well on Facebook. Monitor your fan and follower growth using analytics tools and keep track of any busy weeks where engagement spiked.
On the fundraising team? Create a round-up of each big project you helped support. Were you an integral part of raising money for the organization’s expansion campaign? Keep news articles or press releases about major donor contributions, pull together information about the donations you solicited personally, and show how the funds you raised were helpful to the organization.
You should ask yourself a few key questions when building a digital portfolio:
How can I display the work I did?
If you want to display news articles and photos that are available online, try using a site like Muck Rack to bring them all together. You can send one link to interested parties, and they can see all the content related to whatever event, project, or activity you planned/hosted/supported.
Use free data visualization tools to create a chart showing Facebook fan page growth or information about donations you solicited. Miro is a great way to visually track how you planned an event, while Tableau can help you create beautiful graphs and charts.
Where do I create a digital portfolio?
Digital portfolio sites such as Behance, Portfoliobox, and CarbonMade work well for showcasing visual images. You can always turn to Medium to create a place that hosts a combination of links, photos, videos, and text, or create your own website. And if you have tweets, Instagram photos, Facebook posts, and other online content, you can add these to a custom image gallery.
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Building a digital portfolio is an effective way to share your work and highlight your achievements, regardless of your profession—don’t hesitate to get creative with how you present your skills and experience! Whether you go the route of a website, personal profile on a content platform, or a collection of posts on social media, your portfolio can be a powerful tool to advance your career.
by Kimberly Maul
This post was contributed by a guest author.