Building a Digital Portfolio

By: Teri Grimes

The most effective way to prove to a future employer that you produce quality work is to show them. Although you can tell them about your previous work success all you want, never underestimate the power of a good visual. This is the reason why portfolios are so important. They are a visual representation of everything that you’ve completed in the past that has turned out really well. If you aren’t getting many interviews to show off your portfolio in person, it may be a good idea to build a portfolio online for recruiters to look through. Here are some tips for building an effective digital portfolio:

• Digital portfolios can be less extensive than print portfolios. Since you want the portfolio to be public so people can find it, you also have to worry about the amount of information that you’re putting online. You don’t want to post something just to have your information or works stolen.
• Have a friendly welcome page! It’s the first thing that a recruiter is going to see, so make sure it’s consistent with your brand and easy to navigate.
• Write an ‘About Me’ section, but keep it less than 500 words. Recruiters don’t need to know what the weather was like on the day you were born… just stick to anything that relates to your professional brand or the works present in your digital portfolio. The general rule for web writing is to keep pages like this to about a paragraph long.
• Upload your resume as a PDF document. This makes it both harder for someone to steal and copy, and it’s more likely that the formatting will remain consistent when opened on another computer.
• Have about 2-5 examples of your writing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be related to the industry, but can be something from your classes that you spent a lot of time on. Recruiters want to know that you sound competent on paper.
• Include a page with your references, but only put as much of their information online as each reference is comfortable with. You can always just leave it with their name and position title, and then include a line that says ‘contact me for more information’ at the bottom of the page.
• Have a section where you list your abilities, purely for search engine optimization reasons. If you have a lot of searchable key words on your page, it’s more likely that your page will show up in a search.
• Use websites like visualcv.com, weebly.com, or wix.com to build your own website. Some of these are easier to use than others, so it really just depends on how comfortable you are with web page development.

Now what are you waiting for? Get your work online and get noticed!