The Career Portfolio Workbook

The chances are your boss will want to learn more about putting

together a portfolio for his or her own use!

You can (and should) create some of your portfolio documents your-

self. In addition to asking for documents, you can also add to the items

in your Master Portfolio by creatingthem. We are not talking about

deceptive practices, such as fabricating fake letters of recommendation

or creating bogus performance evaluations. Most assuredly, and we

can’t stress this too much, you should never include anything in your

portfolio that lacks integrity. You won’t feel good about inclusions that

are, in point of fact, dishonest. And if you ever get caught using some-

thing that is not authentic, your credibility will be totally destroyed—

the very opposite of what you are trying to achieve with your portfolio.

You can and should, of course, make minor deletions to protect the

rights of the authors of the documents you use. For example, you would

need to delete proprietary information, such as confidential market

share data, from copies of documents that you will be showing outside

this organization.

Consider taking pictures and using the Web. You can create your

own tailor-made documents by taking pictures of something you creat-

ed or visiting Web sites that have pictures and other information that

pertain to some important aspect of your life so far. One of the authors

of this book used an Internet search engine to find the Web site for a

school in Brazil where he once was an instructor. He was able to down-

load pictures of this school in Rio de Janeiro, which he then combined

with other pictures he found of Rio to create a colorful collage. Since

there is no such thing as a bad picture of Rio, it didn’t take much artis-

tic ability to create a visually arresting prop for discussing his interna-

tional experience.

Color sells. When creating your own documents or copying docu-

ments you already have, remember that color can lend appeal. Obvi-

ously you do not want to include a lot of gaudy colors that have the net

effect of cheapening your own image. But you should be on the lookout

for opportunities to include at least a little dash of color in your collec-

tion of portfolio documents. So, if you receive a letter of commendation

and the person’s name and address at the top of the letter are in color,

you would do well to pay a little extra and have whatever photocopies

are made done in color and on paper that matches the original sta-

tionery.

In this chapter our focus is on finding and creating documents that

are based on your life so far. In Chapter 8, we will discuss activities you

can pursue in the future that will generate a continuous flow of portfo-

lio-worthy documents.

HOW TO ASSESS THE P.E.A.K.S. IN YOUR DOCUMENTS

Thus far we have discussed how you can go about finding and creating

items to include in your Master Portfolio collection. Now, we will show

you a strategy for evaluating the P.E.A.K.S. demonstrated by each of

the documents in your Master Portfolio. If you do this well, when it

Chapter 2: Assembling Your Master Portfolio 21