The Career Portfolio Workbook

When you are at home, leafing through the items in your Master

Portfolio, you are reviewing documents at your leisure. You have plen-

ty of time to pause over certain items and consider their value. The im-

portant point to remember with your Master Portfolio is that you keep

collecting and evaluating potentially useful documents and that you

file them in a way that you can retrieve them easily. In Chapter 2, we

suggest categories that might prove useful for filing and retrieving

items in your master collection. But the system you use for organizing

your Master Portfolio is up to you.

With your Master Portfolio you can be as sloppy or as neat as you

like. But when you are in an interview you want to come across as being

well organized and right on target. For this reason you need a carefully

thought-out format for your targeted portfolio, the portfolio that you’ll

bring to the actual interview.

Your Targeted, “Can-Do Portfolio”

We call the career portfolio that candidates bring to meetings their

Can-Do Portfolio, since this particular collection of documents has been

selected to give evidence that they can dowhatever is considered most

important in the job under consideration, whether it’s a full-time job, a

consulting assignment, or the “job”of being a successful student in

college or graduate school. A good Can-Do Portfolio enables you to make

a convincing case that you are ready, willing, and able to get the job

done. In Chapter 3, we will discuss in depth how a career portfolio can

be successfully targeted in this fashion. In Part 2 we also give specific

examples of Can-Do Portfolios that have been targeted for different

uses.

Our experience with clients indicates that a highly effective tar-

geted portfolio can be organized around the following five categories,

which can be easily recalled using the acronym, P.E.A.K.S.

THE P.E.A.K.S. CATEGORIES

Personal Characteristics

Experience

Accomplishments

Knowledge

Skills

Prior to conducting our research, we thought, as many people do, that

what employers are primarily seeking in job candidates is an applicant

who has the right combination of knowledge,skills, and experiencefor

the job, along with a history of noteworthy achievementsin comparable

situations. Clearly, these are all very important qualifications in most

employers’ minds. But there was something missing from this list, and

it turns out it’s the most important dimension.

When we surveyed people who interview job candidates and asked

them to rank the relative importance of a job applicant’s knowledge,

Chapter 1: Introduction: What Is a Career Portfolio? 9