Back to School 14 Day Get Hired Challenge – Day 3

Our Back to School 14 Day Get Hired Challenge will get you in career shape this January. Your next challenge is…

Day 3: Create an Online Professional Portfolio

Nothing impresses an employer more than seeing ambitious college students who know how to exhibit their work in a professional way. Your online portfolio helps with your online presence so that when employers search your name (which will happen if you’ve applied to a particular position), they can see all the projects you’ve been working on. Check out this online portfolio from an incredibly talented student we hired on WayUp for a photography position, Julia. When we initially asked her for examples of her work, and she sent over that link, we were wowed.

A few really cool things we can learn from Julia’s online portfolio:

• Her name is prominent – it’s clear that the website and the work is hers
• She added her social media handles. You should be smart about displaying and linking to the other outlets where you promote your work: for example, if you use Instagram to post your original photographs and designs, make sure to include your social media handles in your online portfolio so that employer can follow you.
• Her work is very well organized by location and by type in the Projects section of her portfolio – it’s easy to navigate.
• She incorporated a blog to show off that she’s not only a photographer but also a writer. This is great because it shows employers that she’s versatile. Not only that, but her blog is linked to her photographs in such a way that it shows that she’s clearly passionate about what she does.
• She included an “About me” section describing herself and her passion along with a contact form, allowing her to receive requests for part-time gigs and projects.

Whether you want to publish your research on a biology project, show off your sick backend developer skills, or map out the strategy and data you discovered working in sales over the summer, use your online portfolio to house videos, articles, photographs, and other types of work. Start off using Wix or WordPress – these sites have tons of templates to help you show off the best version of you. Good luck and we’ll see you back here for Day 4!