PROFESSIONAL  PORTFOLIOS
Draft of a resource guide for the AAG Careers website
JW Harrington
13 August 2006

Where are you in your development as a professional – in terms of your skills, experience, compensation, responsibilities, and contributions?  How have you gotten to this point?  If you reflect on that path, can you learn something about your preferences, learning styles, and weaknesses – weaknesses on the job and mis-steps in gaining the sorts of professional experiences you want?

How have others described or assessed you?  Wouldn’t it be more powerful for you to be able to show your supervisor or interviewer how others have assessed your work and expressed appreciation, than for you to say “I’m a self-starter” or “I’m a people person”?

Where do you want to go as a professional?  What are your preferences with respect to location, occupation, type of employer or types of contracts?  What mix of technical work, interpretation, selling, managing, and team projects do you prefer?

What problems have you solved in your life, especially problems that an organization, team, or workplace have faced?  Think about it – in the “lean organization” of the past 25 years and the foreseeable future, no one hires or contracts with a person because of her/his education or resume.  Instead, an organization decides to make a hire or pay for contract work because it has a particular set of problems to resolve or specific work to do.  How can you make it really clear that you have solved similar problems and done very similar work?