Build Your Portfolio

Alrighty folks! Today is the final edition of the How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio blog series. I’m sad to see it finish, but I’ve been happy to have helped so many of you!

This post is one in a four-part series for How to Build Your E-learning Portfolio. You can read Part 1 Here, Part 2 Here, and Part 3 Here.

Part 4 is all about actually building out your portfolio and promoting yourself!

Building Out Your Portfolio

For many, building out your portfolio may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be difficult!

You can post samples to dribbble, dropbox, or google drive (if you’re wondering how to share your Storyline samples using Google Drive or Dropbox, I recorded a screencast showing you how to do just that – Click Here). I love sharing knowledge with others, so I incorporated my portfolio into my blog using WordPress (self-hosted); occasionally I do show my work posts, and I have a portfolio section of my website that uses a simple WordPress plugin. It’s also important to invest in yourself, so if you don’t have the time or expertise to easily add portfolio pieces to your website, pay someone who does have the expertise. For example, I spent about 5 hours of my time trying to figure out how to get the ‘simple WordPress plugin’ to work properly and finally conceeded to paying someone to do it for me…it took them half an hour, and only cost 30 dollars. WORTH IT.

• One important thing to note is that you should always ask your clients during the course of the project (or at the end), if you can use a sample from the project in your portfolio. Sometimes they’ll say “sure!”, and you can do what you want. Sometimes they’ll say “sure, but not everything”, and you’ll need to pare things down and have the client review ahead of posting. Sometimes they’ll say “You can’t share the actual project, but you can share a screencast of you walking through the project,” and you can do just that – these situations may crop up if you develop a project that will be resold, and screencast demos are neat because they show the world a behind the scenes peak into your process. Sometimes the client will allow you to include a screenshot or two and specify that a video screencast demo of the project can be made available on request (this occurred with my samples for the YMCA). Whatever your client’s preference, there is usually some way of working a portion of the project into your samples; you just need to think outside of the box.

My current portfolio isn’t fancy, but it does exactly what I need it to do. Clients don’t want to view 500 full courses before deciding they like your work, but they do need to see some representation of your capabilities within the world of e-learning. Every client is different, so it’s important to consider a varied approach to your portfolio. What I mean by this is to include a representative sample of portfolio pieces – several work samples, several personal samples, perhaps some design samples if that’s something you’re good at. Your prospective clients need to believe, from your portfolio or discussions with you, that you are the right person for the job!

Self-Promotion

Once you have your portfolio built, promote yourself! I’m active in several communities (Freelance to Freedom, Articulate E-Learning Heroes, ATD, and LinkedIn), so I promote myself by participating in those communities; this participation is meant to spread knowledge, and be less overt. Ensure you have completed your profiles for any site you participate in, and include links to your website and social media accounts. Twitter and LinkedIn are the only social media platforms that I really use for business, and most of my promotion comes from retweets, views, or from colleagues sharing my content.

I share my content on social media, but it’s also important to share relevant posts from your colleagues because self-promotion shouldn’t be selfish. You should want to support others who are trying to share information and enhance the knowledge exchange. So promote yourself, but don’t be selfish!

If you can afford or have the opportunity to attend or present at industry conferences, this is a fantastic way to promote yourself and to support others. I love presenting at the Articulate Community Roadshows (I’m presenting at another this June!) and I thoroughly enjoyed presenting at and attending Learning Solutions 2015. Not only can you share your wealth of knowledge with a greater audience, but you can support your colleagues as they do the same. You can network the heck of the events, if you’re into that, but I’m a bit more introverted, so I tend to let folks come to me or reach out to individuals I already know. Ensure you have business cards – I don’t hand out a ton, but they’re available if someone asks. Be ready!

Final Note

I hope that this series has provided more clarity as to why an e-learning portfolio is so important and how you can easily create one – remember, your portfolio can provide you with the freedom to choose work you’re most passionate about, so make some time, and show yourself off! Please let me know, in the comments or through the Contact page, if you have any outstanding questions, and I will do my very best to answer expediently.

 

This post is one in a four-part series for How to Build Your E-learning Portfolio. You can read Part 1 Here and Part 2 Here.

Part 3 is meant to address two of the most common challenges: what do I do if all of my work is proprietary or I’ve signed an air-tight non-disclosure agreement?, and I’m not creative, where can I find inspiration?

Sanitize That Sample!

Folks are always asking me what to do in situations where they are legally not allowed to share their work samples, and for those individuals, I recommend sanitizing that sample! Check out the two versions below:

Original

The original is part of a client project that I used as an example for how easily you can sanitize a work sample. Now, I will say that the conversion is not the most visually appealing, but it serves the purpose of illustrating that sanitation doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking.

Sanitized

As you can see in the example provided, sanitizing a work sample doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking. In this case, I removed the logo, changed the background, and changed the colour palette. The content for this organization is readily available online, so it’s not considered controlled goods; therefore, I was able to keep all of the existing textual content. For those of you who are restricted by branding AND textual content, I would suggest removing all branding and replace textual content with dummy text, and tada! You’ve sanitized your work sample!

• Check this site out for a list of fun dummy text generators!

I came from the wonderful world of military contracts, and there is not a whole heck of a lot (aka nothing) you can share because everything is considered controlled goods. But don’t get hung up on not being able to include the super cool 3D render of an aircraft, and instead just focus on pulling apart the elements of the e-learning project (e.g. the menu structure, the iconography, the visual elements used in various screen styles). So, another suggestion for dealing with proprietary content would be to pull elements from existing work and create your own customized version of it. This is great because if you’ve been working on a project for awhile, there might be things about it that you hate (but which have been approved by a higher power), so you can change those things and really make it yours!

Finding Inspiration

Inspiration comes in many forms, and you just need to make something your muse and run with it! There are so many websites and cool apps out there now, so you can easily fall in love with a beautiful design – you might find inspiration in websites, digital magazines, video games, or templates built by others. Whatever inspires you, put your own stamp on it, build it out, and don’t forget to toss it into your portfolio!

For example, one of the E-learning Heroes Challenges (more on that in a moment), was to create our own digital magazine template. These creations were inspired by existing digital magazines and they elements they consist of, and with a little imagination, I was able to bring together my own digital magazine, The Meadows.

Click to view the full interaction.

The E-Learning Heroes Challenges

For me, the Articulate E-Learning Heroes Challenges were huge when it came to kickstarting my motivation. Half the battle is your own imagination, so the challenges were great. Each week, there would be a new challenge and a prompt for entry submissions, and each week, I would be blown away by the entries.

The E-Learning Heroes Community is a supportive environment, and comments tend to be positive or constructive in nature – I’ve made some of my closest friends here! The weekly challenges are a great way to see what your peers are capable of doing and get ideas for how you can apply similar approaches in your future projects.

My portfolio has grown considerably since I began participating in the weekly e-learning challenges, and the greatest praise I have for the weekly challenge is just that; it challenges me to think outside of the box and create interactions I may not have previously considered creating!

 

This post is one in a four-part series for How to Build Your E-learning Portfolio. You can read Part 1 here.

Common Challenges

I understand that building your portfolio can be challenging. As are most things in life.

1. Maybe you aren’t legally allowed to share your work samples because they’re controlled goods or you’ve signed an air-tight Non-Disclosure Agreement;
2. Maybe you don’t have time…we’re not all Beyonce; or
3. Maybe you don’t know where to begin.

My goal here is to become your portfolio-building sensei and hold your hand through this entire process. There are times when you will feel overwhelmed (maybe even by looking at those three challenges), but you don’t need to feel that way. It’s okay. Everything will be okay. You just need to have a real conversation with yourself about when you want to stop hunting down every work opportunity (that costs time that no one is paying you for!) and let your portfolio do the work for you.

Challenging Yourself

Now, you may already feel challenged by those challenges impacting your lack of portfolio, but I’m asking you to challenge yourself even more!

Before taking the leap into full-time independent contractor-ship, I knew that I needed some sort of portfolio. I had been freelancing part-time for several years and was losing out on a lot of opportunities because I had nothing to show when asked “can we see your portfolio?” At the time, I had a full-time job with clients predominantly in the Defence sector, and all of my coolest work samples were classified as controlled goods; I wasn’t able to share any of my professional work, and I felt defeated.

At first I wallowed, but then I had some real-talk with myself, got serious, and created my first two portfolio pieces. The first was a tabbed interaction with hotspot pups designed to teach you how to bathe a cat. When in doubt, go with what you know. I’m a crazy cat lady who didn’t really know how to bathe a cat, but wikihow came to the rescue with some hilarious illustrations, and that simple tabbed interaction is still a hit with clients.

Portfolio Piece # 1

The second portfolio piece was inspired by many of the small business books I had read. I wanted to share brief reviews of these books, so I created a hotspot-based interaction that linked to book reviews contained within scrolling panels.

Portfolio Piece #2

Both of these portfolio pieces were very basic in terms of technological prowess, they were developed in Articulate Storyline before I had become more experienced within Storyline, and were the launching pad for my portfolio.

The moral of this story: When feeling defeated, challenge yourself to be creative!

I’ve presented on How to Build Your E-Learning Portfolio several times over the past year, and it still amazes me how few e-learning portfolios I come across online. For this reason, I’ve decided to take a four-part approach to sharing what I know about building your e-learning portfolio.

The Importance of an E-Learning Portfolio

For e-learning professionals, and for many folks working in other ‘visual’ industries, a visual portfolio is essential. I said it. Essential. A portfolio will help you out if you eventually seek to change jobs, roles, or move into a freelance/contracting role, and it will quell the inevitable question from prospective employers/clients, “can we see some work samples and/or your portfolio?” Portfolios should be considered the cornerstone for every e-learning professional.

In my opinion, there are three main reasons why having a portfolio is important:

1. It highlights your capabilities; specifically with visual technologies;
2. It can act as a visual resume. Most Instructional Designers have had a Subject Matter Expert review their Word storyboard only to say “but, I just can’t visualize it.” As an ID, you know that the next phase is developing the content and media assets, but the SME just can’t get past the storyboard phase. This problem is similar to one that prospective clients have when trying to visualize how you and your abilities could work for them and their needs; and
3. It can lead to an increase in job offers. Once prospective clients can see what you’re capable of doing, their confidence in your abilities will increase, which can help you reduce the amount of hustling you have to do.

My portfolio started out with just a few items, but once it went live, I saw a dramatic increase in the amount of prospective client inquiries I had. You will never stop playing the sales person as a small-business owner, but you can significantly reduce the amount of hustling you do, and will likely be able to enjoy the luxury of being able to choose who you want to work with.

Since tossing my portfolio online, I’ve been able to focus on working with clients I’m passionate about doing work with instead of scooping up anything and everything. It’s also allowed me to funnel work into the hands of other hustling independents to keep their revenue streams open when mine is at capacity.

With all of that being said, I would consider investing time into building my portfolio to be a direct correlation with an increase in my quality of work life and overall job satisfaction!