#29671
Professional Portfolios: Showcasing your Technical Communications Skills 
A portfolio is a technical communicator's most important marketing tool. It showcases talents and abilities while giving prospective employers or clients an opportunity to learn about the candidate's skills and career direction. Often, communicators either do not have a portfolio or have not presented their works in the best possible manner. Professional portfolios are as indispensable as a resume. As the focus of technical communication expands, the need for multiple media to present a communicator's work is inevitable. Rather than a portfolio, multiple portfolios--in hard and electronic--formats are necessary to successfully portray your skills and career direction.
Coker, Louellen Sue. STC Proceedings (2005). Careers>Portfolios>TC
#10246
Put Your Portfolio on the Fast Track
Amongst pomp and circumstance, many graduates are hitting the pavement this spring looking for that pie-in-the-sky job at the dot-coms, design studios and graphic arts firms. Each year the Design and Publishing Center get dozens and dozens of phone calls, letters and resumes all touting the awesome talent and experience of each new crop of graduates. We tip our hats to you with a little advice.
#31967
Taking Your Show on the Road: Constructing and Using an Online Portfolio
I had considered putting my makeshift portfolio on floppy disk. Lack of disk space and a widely-used viewing format made the idea impractical, but technology had moved on in six years, and neither problem existed now. Why not put my portfolio on CD?
Byfield, Bruce. TECHWR-L (2008). Careers>Portfolios>CD ROM
#14769
The Ten Commandments of Effective Portfolios
Offers ten suggestions on how job candidates can assemble a winning portfolio.
St. Amant, Kirk R. Intercom (2002). Careers>Portfolios
#20442
The Web Portfolio Handbook: Preface 
Welcome to The Web Portfolio Handbook. The goal of this book is to help students and professionals envision, plan, design, and create academic or professional portfolios using Web technologies. Web portfolios hold tremendous promise as a pedagogical tool and learning medium. But because web portfolios—for that matter, even portfolios in general—are a relatively recent development, this preface will not only introduce how this book works, but provide a conceptual framework for using web portfolios in the classroom.
Kimball, Miles A. Murray State University (2002). Careers>Portfolios
#22289
Using Portfolios to Help Students Navigate Across Borders 
The concept of borders provides a powerful lens for understanding the student experience in technical communication. During the educational process, our students navigate across borders between teaching and research, between theory and practice, and between nations, cultures, disciplines, and professional organizations. Asking students to think about their experiences at such borders can give rise to interesting questions, insights, and concerns. Student portfolios, developed over the course of their academic careers, provide students with a powerful mechanism for reflecting on and integrating their experiences at these borders.
Turns, Jennifer and Judith A. Ramey. CPTSC Proceedings (2003). Academic>Portfolios
#13717
Using Web-Based Portfolios to Assist Technical Communication Program Development
In 1998, the English Department at Carnegie Mellon built an Internet server (english.cmu.edu) to offer free lifetime accounts to English majors and graduate students. We did this (in part) because we had found that students in our professional programs underused campus facilities for web portfolios. Interviews revealed that many Web-savvy students felt alienated from campus Internet publishing options--which serve students while they remain students, but eliminate accounts (and remove alumni websites) soon after graduation. CMU students in professional programs are exceptionally career-oriented, and interviews revealed that they instead planned to postpone website production until they had graduated, when they could create (more) permanent websites--which often did not happen. By encouraging our students --while students--to create online portfolios which they could maintain even after graduation, we removed one of the obstacles to experimentation by our more enthusiastic students, and offered them options to integrate such work into their studies of genre,audience and accessibility. This experiment has been more successful than originally expected; students' websites are among the most popular locations on the entire server, and have led to continuing communications between alumni and faculty. This has led some of us who advised students in Carnegie Mellon's MAPW (Masters in Professional Writing) and CPAD (Masters in Communication Planning and Design) to rethink issues which arise in the creation of web portfolios.
Sauer, Geoffrey. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Portfolios
#20441
What to Include in a Portfolio
You have started to save your money to buy what is necessary to put your portfolio together, and now you want to decide what to include in it.
#20438
Why Technical Writers Should Create a Portfolio
Provides a rationale for why a portfolio can be an important component of the job search process.
#32658
Creating The Perfect Portfolio
At its core, building an online portfolio is much the same as any other design brief—the only difference is that you are your own client. So as with any design brief, it’s best to begin by asking yourself, “who is my target audience?” Let’s look at two types of portfolios.
Ta'eed, Collis. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Careers>Resumes>Portfolios>Web Design
#34314
Fifty Inspirational Website Introductions
In portfolio web pages, especially in the field of design, one of the first things that you will notice is an introductory text consisting of a few words about the company or the designer behind the site. This can be extremely useful for readers, as it provides quick and direct information about the designer, or the company behind the site. These introductions are generally highlighted by the use of large text, positioned at the top of the site, and always catch the visitor’s eye. They give a more personal feeling to the site and tend to replace the traditional taglines under a logo for example. In this article, we list 50 examples of excellent web page introductions used in portfolio websites that you can use as inspiration for your own designs.
Webdesigner Depot (2009). Careers>Portfolios>Web Design>Writing
#35656
Not long after I went independent, a friend who works at a well-known global advertising agency asked if I would be interested in helping out on a high-profile Web site redesign project. I was pretty stoked. He suggested I come in to meet his team. After meeting with the lead developer and project manager, I was told they wanted to bring me on. All I had to do was to meet the creative director. “Can I see your portfolio?” I hadn’t brought one. “I can give you the URL,” I said. We weren’t near a computer. His glassy response: “I’m not sure what we have to discuss if I can’t see your work.”
Hess, Whitney. UXmatters (2009). Careers>Freelance>Portfolios>Web Design
