Portfolio: What Articulate recommends

Articulate's blog makes helpful suggestions about creating your portfolio. Here's what they suggest. What are your thoughts?

Focus on quality over quantity.

A great e-learning portfolio should spotlight your skills and experience. That means your goal is to curate a small collection of high-quality work samples that demonstrate a range of skills. Don’t get too hung up on having dozens of projects in your portfolio. It’s better to showcase three or four beautiful, unique projects than a dozen mediocre ones with a similar look and feel.

Provide a brief description of each project.

Don’t simply post a bunch of links to your portfolio website and call it done. A great portfolio should look nice AND give prospective clients and employers context for each project. Write a brief description explaining why you chose to include each project in your portfolio. You can also highlight the challenges the project presented, the solutions you found, and any goals you achieved for yourself, the client, or the learners. Even just a few sentences will give visitors to your e-learning portfolio a better idea of who you are and how you work.

Feature your technical skills.

E-learning professionals are often masters of multiple apps—both for authoring e-learning courses and creating custom media to enhance their projects. If you’re proficient in multiple apps, be sure to name them and provide links to relevant samples in your portfolio. For example, if you’re a whiz in Storyline 360, call that out and link to a published Storyline project. If you’re a pro at editing video in Adobe Premiere or podcasts in Pro Tools, call those apps out too.

Showcase your professional background and achievements or endorsements.

To underline your professionalism, make sure your digital portfolio includes a page that highlights some key information about your professional background. You don’t want to make this into a copy of your résumé (although linking to your resume from this page can be handy), but you do want to give potential employers or clients a sense of your background.

To strike the right balance, consider including things like:

Where and what you’ve studied
Companies you’ve worked with or for
Any areas of e-learning specialization, such as creating K-12 education or training for the pharmaceutical industry
Any professional certifications
Any awards or honors for your work

Another thing to include is any professional endorsements or reviews of your work. If you don’t have any yet, ask a trusted colleague or happy client to write a short recommendation of you and your work.

Comments

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