Professional Portfolio Design Memo

Overview

A professional portfolio is an organized collection of relevant documents and artifacts that showcases your talents, most relevant skills, and charts your professional growth. A professional portfolio can be created and used for any discipline or profession (teaching, art, research, nursing, journalism, etc.) but they are key to educating employers as to who you are and what you can do beyond your degree and title. For English majors, this is a key move to dust off perceptions about you only being good at reading books. A portfolio may “live” in two phases:

  • A Personal Working Portfolio – very comprehensive and detailed (what we are working on in this class)
  • A Professional Presentation Portfolio – tailored from your Working Portfolio to suit a specific need (something you should think about for the future)

The process of creating a portfolio enables you to rhetorically frame context and demonstrate examples of your qualifications for professional audiences. It should be seen as an extension of your résumé or curriculum vitae – not a replacement. In this space, you show the work and experience you have already done in your classes, internships, and for fun and frame that work in focused and rhetorically appropriate ways to tell a cohesive story about who you are and what you can do professionally. It can also serve as a valuable tool to assess your professional development and allow potential employers to see who you are and what you can do before they even give you a phone call.

Please note: 50 points of this assignment are gained from turning in a complete first draft for peer review.

What Am I Supposed to Learn Through This Assignment?

Your portfolio is an argument.  That is, it should include the elements of any good persuasive document. It should provide readers with a coherent way to understand the main points you are hoping to make. It should provide clear and related evidence to support claims you make. Finally, it should overtly draw connections among the claims and the evidence, ensuring that readers are able to draw the connections that you hope they will. Through this assignment, you should learn about how to represent yourself as a professional, how to provide evidence to back up the identity that you project, and how to contextualize and discuss the value of your contributions.

The Deliverable

You can take various approaches to putting your professional portfolio together, and you may use any online platform that you think will best work with you to achieve the kind of argument described above.  The materials included in your portfolio could include any of the following, or other projects that we have not yet considered. Generally, however, your e-portfolio should include at least:

  • Descriptive writing that frames you as a professional for readers unfamiliar with you. This might come in the form of an “About Me” page on a website, or a short narrative description on a social account like LinkedIn
  • Examples of or links to texts that illustrate or describe your prior writing and/or editing experiences. Please note that these “samples” may vary in type and need not all be finished documents that you completed. Here are some examples of what might be included:
    • A reflective report based on your experiences in a job, internship, or client project. You might focus on issues such as how writing influences organizational decision making, which genres you learned as part of your work in an organization, how you learned to adapt to the organizational and genre conventions of the organization, or how you contributed to a particular collaborative process.
    • A case study discussing some aspect of your experience in a job or internship.
    • An extensive product or a range of communicative products produced for an employer during a job or internship experience such as style guides, orientation manuals, employee handbooks, web sites, social media sites, etc
    • Materials and artifacts from your coursework, professional activities, conference presentations, publications, etc that would facilitate your job search efforts.
  • Writing that draws a direct connection between the descriptions of you and the examples of what you’ve done

Getting Started

This assignment is assessed through effort and deliverables rather than standardized task list. As such, grade ranges are determined through different and amounts of deliverables produced.

  1. You’ll start by reviewing portfolios of at least three other professionals, students, or alums. For each portfolio you review, write a brief summary of what you see, and then an analysis of what you see (for instance, identifying aspects you found useful, helpful, and sound, and perhaps aspects you found distracting, unnecessary, or unprofessional). Generate a list of goals you have for your own portfolio—recommendations for yourself. Be as specific as you can at this point in time. You might include recommendations for how you will anchor yourself as a professional, or how you will distinguish yourself as a professional. You might include recommendations on what categories of work you will want to include in your portfolio. Check out some examples:
    1. Auburn student examples
    2. MSU student examples
    3. Stanford professional e-portfolio showcase
    4. How to Create a Free Professional ePortfolio Using Google Sites
    5. How to create a Google Site 2015
    6. Amazing Portfolio Sites Created with Wix
    7. Creating an E-Portfolio on LinkedIn
  2. For each portfolio you review, write a brief summary of what you see, and then an analysis of what you see (for instance, identifying aspects you found useful, helpful, and sound, and perhaps aspects you found distracting, unnecessary, or unprofessional).
  3. Generate a list of goals you have for your own portfolio—recommendations for yourself.
  4. Be as specific as you can at this point in time. You might include recommendations for how you will anchor yourself as a professional, or how you will distinguish yourself as a professional. You might include recommendations on what categories of work you will want to include in your portfolio. You might include recommendations about how your portfolio will look and “feel” (through color choice, layout, etc.).
  5. Use your resume as a launching point to identify “holes” in your experiences. Include a section in your document where you list and describe what courses you want to take, what work you want to do, and what further research you need to conduct to fill these “holes” in your experiences. For instance, if you don’t have any community engagement work on your resume, you might identify a community-based group to join, or a project that you want to volunteer for.
  6. NCSU has a number of great resources curated on their WordPress Video Tutorials Page. If you need help with a particular problem, start there.

Other Tips

  • The likelihood of a future employer sitting down and reading through a complete sample with out a brief description in your portfolio is low. For this reason, it is important to have skimmable descriptions that pull out what you want readers to understand about your writing or your experience. Tell them directly what you hope they will notice.
  • Keywords are very important. For most of you, there will be many different ways that you could describe your skills, characteristics, and prior experiences. You should choose language that connects you to the professional fields and positions that you want to build relationships with.
  • As with any other kind of writing, the key to a successful portfolio will be getting feedback from many people on the arrangement, writing style, visual

Getting Started

This assignment is assessed through effort and deliverables rather than standardized task list. As such, grade ranges are determined through different and amounts of deliverables produced (please see contract).

  1. You’ll start by reviewing portfolios of at other professionals, students, or alums. For each portfolio you review, write a brief summary of what you see, and then an analysis of what you see (for instance, identifying aspects you found useful, helpful, and sound, and perhaps aspects you found distracting, unnecessary, or unprofessional). Generate a list of goals you have for your own portfolio—recommendations for yourself. Be as specific as you can at this point in time. You might include recommendations for how you will anchor yourself as a professional, or how you will distinguish yourself as a professional. You might include recommendations on what categories of work you will want to include in your portfolio. Check out some student examples from other programs.
  2. For each portfolio you review, write a brief summary of what you see, and then an analysis of what you see (for instance, identifying aspects you found useful, helpful, and sound, and perhaps aspects you found distracting, unnecessary, or unprofessional).
  3. Generate a list of goals you have for your own portfolio—recommendations for yourself.
  4. Be as specific as you can at this point in time. You might include recommendations for how you will anchor yourself as a professional, or how you will distinguish yourself as a professional. You might include recommendations on what categories of work you will want to include in your portfolio. You might include recommendations about how your portfolio will look and “feel” (through color choice, layout, etc.).
  5. Use your resume as a launching point to identify “holes” in your experiences. Include a section in your document where you list and describe what courses you want to take, what work you want to do, and what further research you need to conduct to fill these “holes” in your experiences. For instance, if you don’t have any community engagement work on your resume, you might identify a community-based group to join, or a project that you want to volunteer for.
  6. NCSU has a number of great resources curated on their WordPress Video Tutorials Page. If you need help with a particular problem, start there.

Deliverables

A career centered design specification for a professional portfolio that you can link to and contains rhetorical framing of the work you have done in your internship.

  • We’ll be using NCSU’s wordpress.com to do this, which is free and a fairly easy site to use (make sure to scroll down to the free student version). Also, you can have a number of different sites with wordpress.com– in other words, you could set one up for our class, one for your knitting club, one for another class, you can get your own when you graduate and just export your content.
  • While this is generally a site/software that is used for “blogging,” I mean something different for the our Portfolio. Basically, you will be using it as a web site for publishing the various writing assignments for the class and organizing them in a fitting manner.
  • Part of what this assignment will be about will be learning more about how wordpress.com (and similar “content management sites”) work. So toward that end, some of the details of how you setup your site– the layout choices, links, images, other content, etc., etc.– will matte.

Format

Submission (through Moodle)