that indicate that you have the personal characteristics that the inter-
viewer is likely to consider highly desirable. Remember, your portfolio
gives you the opportunity to make these key intangibles tangible.
Be wary of featuring skills and knowledge that you donot enjoy
using. If you have a skill or area of knowledge that you feel an inter-
viewer would value but you do notenjoy using, look out! You may well
find yourself getting a job you can’t stand.
The more you are able to use skills and areas of knowledge that
you enjoy developing and using, the happier you are likely to be.
Assembling a Can-Do Portfolio will give you a great surge of confidence,
but only if it features the P.E.A.K.S. that you value.
Include documents that enable you to lead from strength. Docu-
ments that demonstrate any of the desired P.E.A.K.S. that are par-
ticularstrengths of yours should be considered strong candidates for
inclusion in your targeted portfolio.
Use documents to address important concerns about your qualifi-
cations. Is there something about your candidacy that makes you
vulnerable? An example of a vulnerability that can be effectively
addressed with a good portfolio item would be the gender issue that a
male obstetrics/gynecology physician would face. See, for example, the
career situation of Zachary Schwartz, an OB/GYN, in Part 2. Roughly
80 percent of the doctors he would be competing against for a position
in the women’s health field would be female physicians. The burden
was on him to overcome the presumption that female patients would
find a female doctor far more sensitive to their needs and concerns than
he, as a male, could ever be. For this reason he included in his portfolio
a letter from a female patient that thanked him for his caring manner
and sensitivity to her concerns and needs.
Try to include no more than twenty items in your Can-Do Portfolio.
We would suggest that you first decide which items you feel make good
entries in your Can-Do Portfolio, and then cut this list back, based on
the physical capacity of the carrying case you choose to use and the
number of documents that you feel is manageable. As a rule of thumb,
we suggest that twenty documents is the absolute upper limit. And you
certainly do not need this many items. In Part 2, we give examples of
how nicely targeted portfolios can be assembled with only eight docu-
ments.
One thing to bear in mind is that the more documents you bring
with you to an interview, the more time it will take to put your hands
on a document that you suddenly decide you want to present. This
brings us to our next subject, how best to organize the items in your
Can-Do Portfolio.HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR CAN-DO PORTFOLIO
There is only one rule you must follow when choosing a system to
organize the items in your Can-Do Portfolio: Items must be easily
retrievable under pressure.With this rule in mind, the following are
some things to think about.Chapter 3: Targeting Your Portfolio 39