For one reason or another you are evaluating the optics of your portfolio.
This might be due to the job market, personal or professional goals, or a change in priorities.
Regardless it is never a bad time to look at your public-facing presence and evaluate areas of improvement.
But not only should it exist - it should tell a story.
Assembling a Portfolio
While a resume can be one element of your portfolio - it is not the sole element.
Your portfolio can be a story that tells more than what you’ve accomplished - it tells a story of your experiences along the way.
Retrospective
So we ask ourselves: “What does my portfolio consist of?”
It can be obvious:
- Public GitHub Activity
- Certifications
- Public Speaking
- Publications
- Badges (Credly, etc.)
It can also be less obvious:
- Community Engagement
- Private skills development
- Advocacy
The point of this is not to be exhaustive - but to establish a list of references that you can use to tell your story.
Discoverability
Similarly you need to ask “Can anyone find this information?”
LinkedIn Profiles are essentially a resume today - but there is soo much much to explore.
Having a place to consolidate that and make it discoverable can be a big advantage.
This might be custom - such as building your own portfolio website. It might be aggregating various source of data like how Openprofile.dev works. Openprofile.dev gives you a space for automatic LFX insights and the ability to add recorded sessions and badges to your profile. It might also just include what information is easily discoverable on LinkedIn.
Ideally it is all of the above and/or various other ways to expose the work you do objectively and accounts for historical relevance.
Gap Analysis
We’ve now collected the work we’ve done to date and we want to look at the gaps in our portfolio.
What do we need to think about?
Much like a cover letter - you should have goals that drive towards a target. Sure you should do what makes you happy. But if you are investing the time to learn and grow - you should put yourself in a position that aligns with your goals.
Something like a certification shouldn’t be solely “I achieved passing the exam” - but rather “Here is what I learned from achieving this certification…”.
If you were in this phase and wanted to start with a fresh target - this is an opportunity to explore “what could I pursue that is meaningful to my/target-employer/other goals?”
Build and develop an understanding of new skills. Get involved with communities that use or develop those skills or technologies. Help others learn those skills.
These are all great stories to tell.
Get Involved
Sometimes easier said than done - but let’s look for ways to get involved.
- Community spaces - show up and observe
- Advocate for yourself learning and also helping others learn
- chop wood/ carry water - look for opportunities to take on work that aligns with your goals
- Ask questions - there are no bad questions
- Leave camp cleaner than you found it. If you see something out of place - fix it.
- Improve the baseline - work through the fundamentals and identify ways to make them more effective.
Sometimes we forget that the basics aren’t always so basic. Anyone of any capacity has the ability to improve the baseline.
Networking
Having an account on various professional social media sites alone is not networking.
Presence is networking - showing up and observing others - contributing to the conversation - being involved with others is networking.
Summary
We do all of this (and more) to build a story that we can tell. All of this is also only part of our story; there may very well be grand experiences that are private for very good reasons.
The better we are at making this discoverable the better chance we have at our story telling itself - which may just be the next step. Once we progress from building a portfolio we can begin to think about how we build our own personal brand. More to come on that topic.