The Career Portfolio Workbook

opsis of how portfolio items should be used in an interview, see “How Do

You Actually Use a Career Portfolio—and When?”in Chapter 1.

It’s nice if you can find enough documents to cover all five

P.E.A.K.S. categories. But you should put particular emphasis on find-

ing items that demonstrate the P.E.A.K.S. that are likely to be consid-

ered of top priority by the people to whom you will be showing your

portfolio. Items that give evidence of desired personal characteristics

are likely to fall into this category.

To save time, we are focusing on gathering pre-existing documents

that you can put your hands on without too much trouble. In Step 9, we

will discuss some ways to get and create documents you feel you should

have but don’t. Honest ways, that is!

Step 7: Use a P.E.A.K.S. Format to Organize Your Documents

Your goal in this step is to put together a rough draft of your Can-Do

Portfolio that is organized according to the five P.E.A.K.S. categories. To

do so, we recommend that you get five manila folders and print the fol-

lowing headings on the tabs:

Personal Characteristics

Experience

Accomplishments

Knowledge

Skills

Once you have created folders that have these tabs, do a rough sort of

the documents you have collected, filing each document according to

which of the above P.E.A.K.S. that document demonstrates.

Clearly, some of your items could be filed under more than one of

the above categories. In these cases you can put photocopies of the same

document in two or more different sections.

If you are thinking of using a loose-leaf notebook instead of mani-

la folders to hold the documents for your draft, that’s fine, but do not

punch holes in original documents, since this can make them less ap-

pealing visually. Either place the documents in translucent sheet pro-

tectors with holes or make photocopies of your original documents and

then punch holes in the copies.

Don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over what should go where.

This is a rough draft that you can refine and hone in the next two steps.

Step 8: Assess the Draft of Your Portfolio, Strategically

Now that you have a rough draft of your Can-Do Portfolio, your task is

to assess your draft from a strategicpoint of view in order to select the

best documents to include in your final draft and identify the holes that

you should try to fill.

It is important to understand that your portfolio is meant to be a

tool you can use to enhance the presentation of your qualifications for

the opportunity you are pursuing. In most situations, your portfolio

Chapter 10: Portfolios on the Fly: Creating a Portfolio in a Few Hours 147