topic: Portfolio

Tags employability-sprint

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Your portfolio is the real substance and what employers really care about at the end of the day, as it answers the question: “What are you already able to do for us?”. When creating your portfolio, keep the following in mind:

  • You need both substance and polish. You need to have solid projects, but you also need to package them well to concisely communicate what you can do.
  • Quality matters more than quantity. Two really powerful and relevant projects beat 10 generic projects.
  • Patience and perseverance. This article outlines a process for treating your portfolio as an iterative product for which you’re constantly seeking feedback, and to which you’re constantly making improvements. You can ask for feedback during interviews, or reach out to people in the field who might be willing to help. Constantly improving this “product” is a potential career game-changer!

There are at least two people at each hiring organisation who you’ll need to impress with your portfolio:

  • A recruiter will be doing a quick scan of many, many CVs, digital profiles, and portfolios. Their task is to create a shortlist of candidates for the hiring manager. They’ll be looking for a set of projects that are UNIQUE, well polished (i.e. look great), and display the relevant skills for the job in question.
  • The hiring manager/team lead will usually be more technically skilled and will be digging deeper into the projects of short-listed candidates. They’ll be more interested in things like code quality and how well you implemented best practices from the field, e.g. how good were your unit tests, or how well did you clean the real-world data you used?

If there’s one thing that’s repeated in all the advice we’ve read on portfolios, it’s that your projects need to stand out. They need a little personality. They should not be based on a walk-through tutorial – too many people use those. Ideally, they should deliver real-world value for someone – something which you should emphasise.

For developers, you will be required to create the following accounts:

For designers, you will also create the following accounts:

There are many other industry-specific platforms and networks that you can also use. Here are some of the ones we recommend looking into:

Additional resources

Highlighting Work You Did With An Employer

Unfortunately, there’s bound to be some work that you do with employers/clients that you can’t show in full on your portfolio. For example, most employers won’t want you sharing their entire code base with the outside world.

That said, there’s little preventing you from sharing a high-level summary of a project you worked on. The summary could outline the problems you solved and how you did so. As long as it’s not giving away any “secret sauce” that the company wouldn’t want to share publicly, you can always package it as a “case study” or even as a bullet point explanation on your CV.

If you’re unsure about it, it’s best to check with your client/employer first, as there can be legal implications to sharing stuff they’d prefer to keep private. Depending on the type of organisation, they might be very comfortable letting you share some of the snippets of code you wrote or screenshots of dashboards you built, etc.

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