side of the law because you have distributed an organization’s propri-
etary format for doing written performance evaluations.
Documents that are not self-explanatory are not likely to be very ef-
fective on a Web site.Any portfolio item that needs context and expla-
nation to be understood is not likely to be a very powerful document in
a Web-based portfolio. You can insert little text boxes that attempt to
explain the relevance of the documents, and you can even try using
voice-overs to explain how the documents demonstrate your important
P.E.A.K.S., but it’s not the same as being there yourself and responding
to questions that the viewer might have.
Having to leave out documents that must be explained to be effec-
tive is likely to significantly dilute the impact of a Web-based portfolio.Targeting Issues
The more precisely a portfolio is targeted, the more useful it is likely to
be in helping you get the career opportunity you are pursuing. As ex-
plained in Chapter 3, you want to have documents in your targeted
portfolio that demonstrate the particular P.E.A.K.S. that the people
who can help you consider most important.
If you intend to target your online portfolio, here are some things
to think about.Creating a Web-based career portfolio that is open to all limits your
options.If you create a single Web-based career portfolio that anyone
can access, you lose the ability to offer different portfolios to different
audiences. If, like Popeye, you decide “I yam what I yam,”and you want
to post just one portfolio and let the chips fall where they may, that’s a
worthy sentiment. But you are losing the ability to make subtle ad-
justments in how you present yourself to different people in different
situations.
Web-based portfolios can be targeted.An alternative to the one-
size-fits-all Web-based portfolio is to make different online portfolios
available to different people by having different addresses for each
portfolio. These addresses would be handed out selectively. Or, you can
have one Web address for all of your portfolios, but have different pass-
words to access different versions of the portfolio.
People may notice when you retarget your Web-based portfolio. Be
aware that once you have handed out an address and/or password for a
Web-based portfolio, this information can be passed along to others to
whom you might wish you could show a somewhat different version of
your portfolio. This pass-along might become an issue if you are going
through a series of interviews for a job. For the second and third job in-
terviews in an organization, you might want to use a portfolio that has
been retargeted because of things you learned in an earlier interview.
You can, of course, change the content of your online portfolio along the
way, but your interviewers might notice that you have done so and not
feel comfortable with “someone who keeps changing his story.”This
issue is not so prevalent with a hard copy portfolio that you carry
around in a briefcase. Since you don’t show the whole portfolio at any130 Part I: Building, Using, and Maintaining Your Career Portfolio
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