3 Reasons to Have A Portfolio

Aspire to Succeed 2 Minutes

Have you ever thought about creating your personal Education-Career Portfolio?

It is okay if you don’t have a portfolio yet. However, you really need to have one. It is never too late to design and create your first portfolio.

Why Do You Need One?

Here are the three reason to have an Education/Career Portfolio. A portfolio helps you

  • Get to know what makes you happy – who doesn’t want to be happy. It is about developing confident knowledge of who you are. What truly makes you happy? Is it about finding a challenge? Figuring what everyone means when they tell you that you need to find your purpose? Identifying what you are passionate about? Clarifying your next mission or whatever you would like to call it?
  • Create a career action plan – experiential learning or employment opportunities you want to explore. It can also help you design your next steps or goals that will lead to your success and overall happiness.
  • Have the knowledge and tools to regularly update your resume – an important skill these days. Using artifacts and memorabilia of your accomplishments will help you identify stories to market your skills – think interviews, LinkedIn profile, resumes and so on.

What To Include in a Portfolio?

Ok, not convinced? Humor me and ask yourself this question. What will you include in a portfolio? It is easy and can be fun!

You start building your portfolio by collecting mementos that you value. These mementos can remind you of good or bad moments in your life. The choice is yours!

Getting Started

Here are some ideas to get you started but remember that it is your portfolio and only you get to determine what to include in your education-career portfolio:

  • Self-assessments
  • Resume/CV
  • A list of dreams/aspirations
  • A checklist of goals or objective that you hope to accomplish
  • Any awards or mementos of accomplishments that have value to you
  • Compile and choose the top 10 projects that you created, alone or as part of a team
  • References/testimonials

Value Your Voice

Your voice is central to the creation of the education-career portfolio. You get to decide what to include in it, how to create it, and how you will utilize it in the future.  

Most importantly, beware that the eventual focus is on scaffolding you to use the portfolio as a tool to launch your experiential learning or to develop and maintain a successful career journey.

It’s In YOUR Hands

The responsibility for the betterment of your future is in your hands. Zoom your focus on developing skills and pursuing intentional practices along with iterative lifelong learning, experience processing, and continuous reflection.

The more involved you remain in your career story creation, the happier you will be with your storyline.

Published by Dr. Hoda Kilani CPCC

I am a passionate career literacy and gifted education advocate! If you like talking about either of my two passions, let’s chat. For the past few years, I have been a career and educational coach. Before that, I wore many hats experimenting with every opportunity that presented itself and throughout it all, my passion and commitment was to help others succeed and make a difference in the world. I have been working from home since 2013! In the past few years, I developed a private career coaching practice Right Career Fit, earned a Master of Education, a Doctor of Education as well as a career coaching certificate. The success of my private practice is a testament to my talent development and resource planning skills. I am a lifelong learner with a natural intellectual curiosity and I love challenges. Presenting and attending conferences across North America (in person and virtually) reflect my belief in the value of advocating for my two passions. I am also constantly looking for opportunities to influence public policy and increase support for the teaching and learning communities with a focus on inclusive career practices in Canada and globally. This is why I am a Chair/Board Director on various Boards. The past year has been a mix of significant losses and unforeseen challenges as well as amazing opportunities and unanticipated gains for many of us. I hope everyone is doing well...Despite all of this, each of us survived in our own way. Yet we continue to feel overwhelmed and concerned about the forces that the new year could bring. I encourage you to get involved in your communities, personal or professional. There is nothing like having the support of people who care about you during the ups and downs of this era. To close, I strive to be a spokesperson for the importance of career education and continue to work with a variety of media to create awareness of its value. I am on a mission to have #careerliteracy trend across social media. If you care to join me, let’s chat!

Published

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.