comes time to actually select items from your Master Portfolio to take
to an interview you will be able to quickly put your hands on useful doc-
uments. In Chapter 3, we will show you some techniques you can use to
decide which of your P.E.AK.S. you should feature in the Can-Do Port-
folios you take to particular interviews. But first, it is very useful to
know just what P.E.A.K.S. you have in your Master Portfolio.The Career P.E.A.K.S. Measurement Form
To demonstrate how you can assess the items in your Master Portfolio,
we have created a worksheet called the Career P.E.A.K.S. Measure-
ment Form. Prior to showing you how to use this form, we should make
one thing very clear.You do nothave to fill out a Career P.E.A.K.S.
Measurement Form for every item in your Master Portfolio.Some of you
will want to use this form for many of your items; and others of you will
decide you would prefer to assess your documents without filling out
this form. The important thing is that you understand the thinking
that should go into analyzing your documents. Whether or not you use
the Career P.E.A.K.S. Measurement Form to record your assessments
of the relative strength of your documents is entirely up to you. We do
recommend, however, that you read the next section so that you have a
very clear idea as to what is involved when you assess the P.E.A.K.S.
represented by a document.An Example of Assessing the P.E.A.K.S. in a Document
Let us say, as a hypothetical example, that during the past year you
were given the responsibility of leading a team of diverse people in rais-
ing productivity in your department by 10 percent. You had to deal with
some very difficult personalities, but by the end of the year, the innov-
ative ideas that your team recommended and subsequently adopted
resulted in a 15 percent increase in productivity. In your annual per-
formance evaluation your boss gave you a very favorable set of com-
ments on your ability to get results.
To illustrate how you might describe and assess the P.E.A.K.S.
that are featured in your annual performance review we have filled in
a Career P.E.A.K.S. Measurement Form, which follows.
At the top of the Measurement Form, there is a place for the name
of the document and a brief verbal description of the document. Under
“Code”you can indicate where this document is located in your file. In
this case, the document happens to be the third item in the “Task
Accomplishments”section of your Master Portfolio file. The assignment
of a code to identify your documents is totally arbitrary. Depending
upon the filing system you choose to use, you may or may not have sep-
arate categories in your Master Portfolio. The important point is that
you know where to find this document.
Next to each P.E.A.K.S. category, we give an example of what you
might write, and a hypothetical numerical score that you might give
each of the P.E.A.K.S., ranging from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). These
scores are meant to reflect how strong you feel each of the individual22 Part I: Building, Using, and Maintaining Your Career Portfolio