Getting Started
The Career Portfolio is an online tool created by the Career Center that helps students show evidence of learning to instructors and present their skills to employers, graduate schools, and other organizations. The Career Portfolio will help your students:
- examine and demonstrate their learning and career goals
- reflect on courses, work experiences, and extracurricular activities
- learn about skills employers value
- find ways to develop skills
- show you have these skills through examples of your work
- deliver all of this on the Internet only to the people they choose
- skills identification
- curricular and co-curricular planning
- reflection/personal growth
- marketing tool
- professional growth
- accreditation requirements
Introducing your class to the Career Portfolio at the beginning of the semester and having them complete smaller assignments throughout the semester will allow students to become comfortable with the system and learn how their course learning is related to their future career goals. For example, you may have students create a Profile that lists their career goals early in the semester. As they complete assignments, they can upload them to their Career Portfolio and reflect on how a particular assignment helped them to develop a specific skill.
Current Faculty Usage
A summary of the Career Portfolio survey sent to faculty/staff that use the portfolio system can be found in the document below.
Assignment Ideas
Here you will find some examples of how current faculty and staff have used the Career Portfolio in their courses, as well as other assignment ideas you can incorporate in your class.
How Can the Career Center Help?
Quotes from instructors who have used the Career Portfolio:
- The Career Portfolio is one of the key tools in my Career Futures class. Having them develop their profile and skills section prepares them for all of the upcoming segments of the class. It helps them make the transition in their heads from being students to being employees.
- It is just a really nice way to introduce the notion of skills into career and educational planning.
- I find that the portfolio can get students more excited about the job search process and can even boast their self-esteem. It is a great tool for all students to use and a way to include samples of their work!
- I particularly like the way it helps student record and reflect on the practical skills they are developing through their academic work.
Quotes from students who created a Career Portfolio for a course:
- I started developing my career portfolio as an assignment for class. At first it was just another assignment but after I worked on it for a while I realized how much I knew about myself and how important it really was.
- This process was a great way to identify and organize skills in preparation for writing a resume and cover letter as well as in preparation for an educational program interview.
- I created a career portfolio for a graduate career course. I would highly recommend making a career portfolio. Not only did it help me organize my thoughts in regards to job searching, it allowed me to really think deeply about what I have to offer as a potential job candidate. A career portfolio, resume, and cover letter should be mandatory for all students before graduation.
- At first I thought it was a worthless assignment but once I got in my interviews, it was amazing how much it helped. The exercise of creating the portfolio helped me in connecting experiences to skills.
- This is a great tool and opportunity to send your resume/qualifications to potential employers more efficiently and display your overall skills in one primary setting.
