ledge will enable the person with whom you are talking to give you the
kind of information and advice that would be most helpful to you.
It is a good idea to practice giving a 2- to 3-minute summary of
your background and the career direction that you are now considering.
Learn how to get to the point quickly. The more you practice, the less
rambling and more focused you are likely to be.
Consider preparing a resume for this interview. Being able to bring
a good resume to informational interviews offers some advantages. You
can hand your resume to the people whom you are interviewing and in
a matter of seconds they can get a quick overview of your background.
And if the interview goes well, they can use this resume to describe you
to other people and maybe even send it to a job lead that occurs to
them. You might also ask them to give you feedback on your resume.
On the other hand, you may decide that you would prefer to create
a resume after an informational interview, so that you can use what
you learn to further target and hone your resume. If your interviewees
ask you for a copy of your resume, you can always tell them you are in
the process of reworking it and that you would be happy to send them
a copy. In fact, you can include a copy of your revised resume with your
thank-you note and mention that the interview gave you the precise in-
formation and insights you needed to get your resume into its current
form.
So, whether or not you prepare a resume in advance of an infor-
mational interview is up to you. But bear in mind, an informational in-
terview does give you an excellent opportunity to get constructive feed-
back on your resume.
Assemble a careful draft of your Can-Do Portfolio, if you are ready
to do so. As noted earlier, informational interviews can also be used to
get constructive feedback on drafts of your Can-Do Portfolio.
If you intend to bring a draft of your targeted portfolio to an infor-
mational interview, the items that you include should be carefully
selected according to the criteria discussed in earlier chapters. The
carrying case should be the one you intend to use on a job interview.
And the items should be well organized and have the look that you in-
tend to achieve when you present them in a job interview.
Showing up at an informational interview with a big stack of dis-
organized, loose items and asking,“So, which of these do you think I
should include in my portfolio?”would be inappropriate. For starters,
the person you are interviewing might not know much about career
portfolios, and so it would be unreasonable to expect her to show you
how to put together a good portfolio. More importantly, you would be
wasting that person’s time by having her sift through potential port-
folio items. What you are trying to do is get feedback on the impact of
your best effort at assembling a convincing portfolio.
So, if you wish to get useful feedback on the latest draft of your
Can-Do Portfolio, it should be as good as you can make it at that point
in time. And it should look exactly the way you think it should look if
you were taking it to a job interview.52 Part I: Building, Using, and Maintaining Your Career Portfolio