Improving Your Portfolio is Easier Than You Think

If you’re involved in the creation of digital products, you’re aware of the importance of having a portfolio to showcase your work. Whether you’re actively looking for a new job or considering a career change, it’s one of the first things you’ll be asked to share. Having said that, I’m willing to bet that if you ask 9 out of 10 professionals if they’re happy with the state of their portfolio, the answer will be “No.”

Chances are high that any given portfolio has one or more of these problems:

• Recent job and/or project history is missing or lacking in details.
• The design of the website is dated.
• The work shown doesn’t accurately represent the type of work you want to do in the future.

This is not a new problem. But as the Director of Learning for Aquent Gymnasium, part of my job is to pay attention to trends in the web industry, and I had a hunch that the role of portfolios had changed in recent years. To put this theory to the test, my colleague Justin Gagne (Design Lead) and I developed a pilot portfolio workshop for a small group of designers and developers.

Going into the workshop, we had a few assumptions about what we would encounter. Some of those assumptions were accurate, but there were a few surprises as well. So I’d like to share those surprises — or as I like to call them “insights” — with you, in the hopes that they will save you some time and effort when you begin to update your own portfolio.

Why is it so hard to work on your own portfolio?

Before sharing my insights, it’s worth defining our goals for the workshop. We knew that despite understanding the importance of a portfolio, many people felt overwhelmed or blocked from working on them and weren’t quite sure why. To provide structure and help, we had to understand what the specific challenges were.

Make no mistake, the challenges are real. In fact there’s an old proverb (bordering on cliché) that I’ve heard many web professionals reference over the years which is “The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.” This is generally used as an explanation for why one’s portfolio website has been so neglected. After all, if one is busy working on other people’s projects, that leaves little time and energy to work on your own.

There’s some validity to this, it definitely is easier to postpone your own project than it is to postpone one for a client or your regular job. After all, those pay the bills and one needs to be pragmatic.

But there are a few other reasons why working on your portfolio is difficult:

• One of the most challenging aspects is deciding what to include. Web professionals typically work on many projects in any given year, but not all of them may be relevant or appropriate to showcase in a portfolio, sometimes there are even legal reasons: for example many companies have NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) which prohibit the sharing of visuals or projects done while under contract or while employed.
• People also have trouble deciding which projects best represent their skills and abilities, and this often leads to avoidance or focussing on the wrong things, such as taking a week to look for “the perfect” typeface or color scheme for their site.
• Another challenge is figuring out how to organize and present one’s projects while finding the right balance between showcasing the work and providing context and explanation.

When you add all of these challenges up, not to mention the fact that you have no project manager looking over your shoulder, it’s not surprising that portfolios get neglected. There’s also the question of motivation. If you’re happy and comfortable in your current gig, why burn extra calories on nights and weekends to do something that feels difficult? The problem is when circumstances change, if you suddenly need an up-to-date portfolio and you’re doing it under financial stress or time pressures, you’re now making a hard job even harder.

Content truly is king

Our original plan for this workshop was quite ambitious and included sessions on using mood boards and Figma prototypes to head in the direction of visual design. However, we ended up reducing the scope and in the end, it evolved into more of a writing and content strategy workshop. As veterans of the web industry, the old phrase “Content is king” came to mind. This means different things to different people, but for us it represents our belief that people spend a disproportionate amount of time on the visuals, the tech stack, and other aspects of their portfolios, and not enough on the core words and message they want to convey.

The path to good content started with a few deceptively simple questions we asked our attendees:

• What sort of work do you want to get in the future?
• How would you describe your “personal brand” in a sentence or two?
• What past projects are you most proud of, and how could you turn them into case studies?

Make no mistake, these are hard questions to answer! Which is exactly why we asked them. By directing their focus to these difficult questions and giving them some tools to answer them, we helped attendees avoid the common trap mentioned earlier: namely the tendency to get distracted when faced with “the hard stuff.”

DIY Tip: You don’t have to be part of a workshop to work this way. Open up a document and begin by answering these three questions:

• What sort of work do you want to get in the future?
• How would you describe your “personal brand” in a sentence or two?
• What past projects are you most proud of, and how could you turn them into case studies?

Next, consider keeping all your work in writing as long as possible before moving on to the design phase. Keep it simple and start with an About Page. If you want some context and structure, consider checking out our 5-minute tutorial on the topic.

Accountability really works

Accountability was the foundation of our workshop. When someone is working on their own with no oversight, self-imposed deadlines are incredibly difficult to follow. So, creating a formal structure that asks people to show up at a set time each day as part of a group was key. All workshop attendees knew what they were getting into. We didn’t call this a “bootcamp,” but it had a similar vibe — don’t sign up unless you’re willing to commit and put in the work.

To avoid a traditional “authoritarian” model where the teacher is the center of focus, we split people into breakout groups to give them a chance to inspire, help, and commiserate with each other. Additionally, because this was a remote workshop conducted by conference call, we also created a forum on our classroom site with daily assignments that required people to give feedback to get feedback.

DIY Tip: You can use this technique on your own by bringing in a collaborator early into your portfolio writing process. The only qualification for this person is to be someone you trust, and the simplest exercise is to read your content out loud to them (or vice-versa). You’d be surprised how effective this technique is. In fact, I’ve found that hearing my words out loud will instinctively prompt me to make useful revisions even before I receive “official” feedback from my collaborator.

Your portfolio is less important than you think

This insight might seem counter-intuitive, so bear with me. The role of the portfolio has changed substantially over the years; for example, the days of lugging a physical case of printouts to an interview are long gone. The role of the online portfolio has also changed over the last 10 years and specifically since 2020 when remote interviews and work suddenly became commonplace due to the pandemic. Here’s the big takeaway: the way people find your portfolio has changed.

Today, chances are it’s not a search engine that brought someone to your portfolio site. Instead, intermediaries such as LinkedIn, Behance, Instagram, or GitHub are gateways to your lovingly crafted portfolio website. In many ways this changes the context and expectations your visitors have of you before even reading a single word on your site.

It’s also safe to say that people aren’t spending a whole lot of time looking at your content. According to a recent eye-tracking study, recruiters typically spend an average of 7.4 seconds looking at résumés. While résumés and portfolios are different, I suspect the conclusion is the same: the main audience for your portfolio is skimming your content quickly, not studying it in depth.

Rather than be discouraged by this, my stance is that anyone looking to make an impact with a portfolio can use this to their advantage. Take a step back and focus on the core aspects of what a portfolio is good at:

• It remains a great tool to communicate your ideas and approach to creative projects. No matter what your role, explaining your process and thinking is always going to be important.
• Meeting someone in person or by phone or video is still the gold standard, but a portfolio continues to be an excellent way to establish your credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, it allows you to emphasize your strengths such as your track record of producing high-quality work, or your ability to complete projects on time and on budget.

Here’s the final insight: more than ever you need to focus on the sort of work you’d like to do in the future, define it with clarity, and then promote it loud and clear across all platforms. Yes, this includes the portfolio, but also your LinkedIn profile, your resumé, and any other social media you deem appropriate. This is hard work, no doubt, but it will pay off in the long run.

DIY Tip: You can perform a quick content audit of your own professional profile in a few minutes. Open up all your existing material at once: this might include a LinkedIn profile, resumé, portfolio, etc. Now do a quick compare and contrast: is everything aligned across all the platforms? For example, is your recent work up-to-date? Do you have a clear personal statement specifying the work you would like to do and is this message consistent? If you want to delve deeper into this topic, check out this 5-minute tutorial.

Final takeaways

There’s an old saying in advertising: “If you don’t define your brand, other people will.” Typically, this refers to companies, but it applies to people and their portfolios as well. If you don’t define what you stand for and what makes you unique, your visitors will simply do it for you based on their own assumptions.

Our attendees told us that the most valuable aspect of the workshop for them was being given the chance to put time into writing and reflecting on their message and the actual value they had brought to past projects. The second most valuable takeaway was that the group setting gave them a much needed outside perspective. Sharing your work and inviting peer feedback might feel vulnerable… because it is! But if you want your portfolio to be the best it can be, it’s worth stepping out of your comfort zone.

Mind you, everything I described in this article are things you can do yourself, no workshop required. All it requires is a little time, commitment, and a document editor. Remember, standing out in the crowd these days is less about eye-catching visuals or skills and more about being crystal clear on what you’re good at and what work you want to do in the future. So what are you waiting for? Start improving your portfolio!

Want to be the first to know about future Gymnasium workshops? Get on the list.

Improving Your Portfolio is Easier Than You Think was originally published in Gymnasium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.