A professional portfolio is a collection of projects that exhibits your capabilities to face and resolve challenges using your skillset. Building a career portfolio can help you in narrating your career history and how you evolved your skillset over time. Not just that, but it has a lot of other benefits as well!
Sadly, if the truth is to be told – a portfolio is one most overlooked elements by applicants. You might have a shiny resume with a brilliant employment track record. But failing to pin your claims with proof (i.e. portfolio) can toss away your CV into the “rejected” pile.
We are sure that’s not your aim – right? Hence, this blog post will unravel the importance of building a career portfolio and why you shouldn’t be missing it:
9 Reasons Why You Need a Professional Portfolio
Portrays Your Career History In A Captivating Way
Building a career portfolio helps you illuminate your achievements, performance, and contribution. The document meshes together important details like core values, talent, abilities, and strengths in a convincing manner. It further helps the potential employer forecast your potential and decide wisely. Now definitely, if your document holds a positive record of your professional activities, the ball will be in your court.
Represents Your Professionalism
Someone who is sensible enough to keep their work history organized is worth trusting for a vacancy. It represents your overall professionalism. The company considers trusting such kinds of candidates. As a result, you secure the job more efficiently. For example, if you look at Top Resume Canada, you’d notice that it’s a high-rated website and has a well-arranged portfolio in their website. This gives a sense of relief to the customers who are thinking of hiring the service.
Compensates In Career Self-Assessment
Whether you are a full-timer, a committed employed individual, or a freelancer who works on your own terms – self-assessment is important for growth. Having a professional portfolio that rounds up your capabilities helps you in evaluating yourself and how far you have reached from the start line. Also, you can see what you have achieved over time and the areas that require improvement. Using the portfolio, you can also keep track of the upgradation in terms of clients you have encountered throughout time.
Establishes Your Credibility
Career portfolios are known as the key ingredient for establishing your credibility. It actually aids the potential employee in differentiating between your claims and experience. Your document gives a clear insight into your potency and what value you can drive to their company. This also supports recognizing how you can help a brand achieve its vision. All of this combines together to showcase your credibility.
Potential Employee Can Easily Connect the Dots
At times, it can be hard to explain your contribution to every company you have worked at, especially for people with weak verbal communication. Connecting the dots becomes really easy with a career portfolio. Every project and accomplishment indicates your grip on a new skill set or expertise.
Get You More Customers
This is specifically for freelancers and business people! Possessing a well-designed portfolio cuts down the time of research for your customers. Your experience and capabilities are easily accessible with a click. It renders your potential smoothly with the least reading required. The reading and researching time is hashed down, and the decision-making process is catalyzed.
An example of online cover letter writing services can be considered here. Such online service providers keep on updating their portfolios to showcase that they are actively working in the industry.
Result? Customers are easily convinced to hire them.
Illustrates Your Consistency
A perfectly designed career portfolio is the best way to represent consistency in your personal style. This illustrates that you have been working hard throughout your career and will take your career very easily. Also, mentioning relevant upgradations time to time shows that you pay heed to your accolades and endeavors. This might seem like a small point on the shore, but it has a lot of potential to make a difference.
Keeps You Motivated To Keep Going
It’s very easy to get demotivated. Corporate life is filled with ups and downs. In the hour of need, one can draw motivation from their own profile including all successful stories, accomplishments, etc. When needed, one can look back at the mentioned master strokes. You can feed yourself with the thought that if you can pass through previous challenging situations, even this one will not be a problem at all.
Help Your Field Fellow Individuals
Your fellow might be in need of inspiration, and your career portfolio can be a source of rescue. You may have the solution to what they are searching around. A compilation of your previous work will help newbies and newcomers as well. This is important to realize that not all benefits are monetary. Being a mentor to the ones in need is an achievement in itself.
Things To Be Careful About While Building A Career Portfolio
A career portfolio has its own perks, but good sides always have risks. Making your portfolio readily available can result in the theft of your ideas and work. Although the plagiarized work won’t help the stealer in the long run, and they’d stumble seriously, handing over all your efforts to someone doesn’t seem very convincing.
Secondly, individuals often commit a serious blunder of adding every possible thing to their portfolio. For example, if you are a writer – you might not be very confident about the first blog post, right? If yes, there’s no need to add work you are not very confident about.
Thirdly, and most importantly – keep your document well-designed and clean. Avoid adding too many shenanigans to it. The purpose of your document is to reflect your corporate importance. It should be easy to access and read at the same time.
Time To Wind Up
Being organized with your professional documents is surely going to pay you back in the long term. It not just helps you in gaining better opportunities but also assists in standing out to the masses of applicants. By building a career portfolio, you can make your potential employer remember you and jog their memory forever.