Tags | employability-sprint |
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:
There are at least two people at each hiring organisation who you’ll need to impress with your portfolio:
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:
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.