One of the key stages of the hiring process is presenting your portfolio. This part plays a pretty critical role with a direct effect on whether you are going to be approved or rejected by the interviewees. Here we will see about How To Present a Portfolio?
What we are going to go through in this article, also usually referred to as the in-person portfolio, requires a different approach and preparation compared with your online portfolio, which interviewees have already seen.
The way you are going to present it matters a lot. Sometimes someone’s work is either identical or less attractive than the other candidate, but slightly better presentation skills have landed that job position finally for the better presenter. The method you choose to present shows a lot more than your actual work, and how hard you have tried to achieve it, but the real purpose is to combine it with your interpersonal skills, design thinking abilities, public speaking, teamwork collaborations, etc.
Evaluation of Your Portfolio Presentation
As we indicated above, the presentation of your portfolio from the interviewee’s eyes will be evaluated from a broad range of qualities they are looking for in their candidates. We have listed some of these factors below for you to prepare your approach toward presenting your interview based on them.
- Problem detecting and Problem Solving:
the value of your work will be recognized by the size of the problem you have solved, they do not want to see someone who has just tried to fill in their application with a very basic portfolio, but they expect you to be able to solve and develop. The complexity of these problems is also very important as they showcase your seniority level.
- Team Work and Collaboration:
how well you can fit in with your colleagues and what challenges you faced doing so? They often evaluate you, on the position, and your role. Try to mention your past leadership experiences if you’ve got some.
- Adaptability skills:
how did you shape this skill, and through which challenge or mission you felt you own such a skill and it has helped you? Of course, you cannot just tell your skill, you need to demonstrate it with references in real-life examples.
- Results and Outcome:
you usually need to prove the impact of your work, using numbers and statistics. What changes have you made? How much has that impacted the work of the company and your colleagues? Try to distinguish your achievements aside from your team collaboration achievements as well.
Your best friend from the moment you start aiming for a job position is the job description from the company side; why? Because you need to get back at it several times during the stages of your employment. It also helps you to start being the one they are looking for and not even pretend for some parts.
Companies tend to write a complete description for the vacancy they are publishing and all of them have described the characteristics they are looking for in their future colleague; So, implement them in your behavior naturally and try to connect these characteristics with the stages of completing the work sample you are presenting. For example, although we were facing a very strict deadline the adaptability, we gained from our previous experience regarding preparing project X for Exhibition Y, came in pretty handy, and all of the members were actively engaged with their part to repeat that great experience once again, and…
As you can see you need to train your mind to be a good storyteller for many cases in your life; and the most important ones are probably getting a job and your college admission process. Both of them are considered the most game-changing options in anyone’s life. So, if you think you are not good at it, start your research and practice, and don’t worry you will get better over time for sure.
Preparing Your Portfolio
- Consider your time
If you are already thinking of several diverse projects, you own and how to include them all, unfortunately, you cannot present them all because your time will be limited and you also need to manage your time throughout the entire duration of your presentation.
- Select the potential work samples
Decide on a few projects in your portfolio, that you think are the best representative of your abilities and the career path you are willing to continue. They need to be your most recent work samples as well. These works must be the ones that turn you in their eyes a unique one operating in your industry.
- Match them with the job description skills and responsibilities
Again, remember your best friend, we mentioned above? Yes, exactly go through the job description and see which of your work samples best fulfill those requirements, in which ones you executed the same responsibilities that are mentioned in the description of the job you are going to be interviewed for.
- Plan the presentation flow
Another factor is to consider the workflow, and the factors that were mentioned above, like which problems you solved, how did you come up with those solutions, and what was your role in that team? With demonstrative proofs of the success of that project based on the numbers and achievement from different perspectives.
Research well on the previous successful works samples of the type you want to prepare. Review other portfolios to see if you have missed any point; they give you a wide range of ideas to best present your work but remember you should be unique, just the way you are, so be careful none of the materials you are preparing lose its sense of feeling original.
- Finalize the table of contents for each of your works
You have come up with a prototype thus far and made it pretty appealing, set a checklist for yourself that all the headings and the topics that need to be covered about them are all included. Show your work to other people, they can be family members and friends or your peers who are actively engaged in the same field; both would inspire you and the fear of talking in front of others also will be gone.
Conclusion
Now you know it all, start by grabbing a pencil and writing down a checklist of all the things you need to prepare for, from researching and storytelling to re-design and practicing in front of others; you will never know how good you are and how better you should become unless you start by doing the work right away
