Portfolio

About Portfolios

A portfolio is a place where you record and store a collection of your accomplishments. This collection can be a helpful reference for you to use in future courses or jobs and can be very useful for sharing with prospective employers, school admissions offices, and others.

You may even get recruited for a job from your portfolio without applying.

A great option is LinkedIn. How to Use LinkedIn as a College Student To really learn more about LinkedIn, see Learning LinkedIn for Students.

One nice benefit of LinkedIn is that it can be used to automatically populate online job applications for many web sites.

Another is that you can easily find other alumni based on location, career, and field of study. Example

You can customize your public profile to only show certain information or make it visible to no one. Help

Tip: You may want to modify email notification settings. Help

Must-have Components

• Summary (About): introduce / market yourself. Describe who you are, what motivates you, what you are skilled at and what's next. This is a professional summary of your focused, special skills. Help. 10 LinkedIn Tips for Students & New Grads 10 LinkedIn Profile Summaries That We Love (And How to Boost Your Own)

• Experience: any relevant full-time or part-time job experiences, internships, and hackathons (if applicable). Employers love to see anything you have done outside of school.

• Education: add the School, Degree (most at FGCU are Bachelor of Science), Field of Study (like Computer Software Engineering), From Year, and To Year.

Course Components

• Skills: add the skills learned in the course. (Add section -> Skills)

• Course: add course name and number. (Add section -> Accomplishments -> Courses)

  • The course name should be the name of the course, like Introduction to Computer Science

  • The course number should be something like COP 1500, not the CRN

  • Associate with “Student at FGCU”

• Projects: (Add section -> Accomplishments -> Projects) add your Final Project or something best representative of the knowledge attained in the course as a publicly accessible link to your web site, your GitHub, or a PDF file hosted on the web (like OneDrive or Google Drive) Help.

  • In the Description field add the course name and a description of the course and project.

Recommended Components

• These components will fill the Profile Strength meter earning an All-Star profile rating

• URL: Customize your profile URL. Help

• Profile Photo: Upload an appropriate photo. Help. Career Services occasionally offers free professional photo sessions.

• Background Photo: Update the background photo. More info Downloads Canva

• Headline: Write an informative but punchy profile headline. Help 10 Eye-Catching LinkedIn Profile Headlines to Inspire Your Own More info

• Media: Add media samples. (Add section -> Featured -> Media) Help More info 5 Reasons You Should Add Media To Your LinkedIn profile

• Licenses and certifications (Add section-> Background -> Licenses & certifications.) Help

  • Badges

• Skills: Add non-course related skills. The Skills Companies Need Most in 2020 – And How to Learn Them You should have at least 10 key skills that you feel you possess as well as any industry specific words. Employers are looking for leadership skills, ability to work in a team, problem solving skills, communication skills, strong work ethic, initiative. They search profiles for certain skills which could help you get recruited.

  • Take Skill Assessments

    • for COP 3003: Object-Oriented Programming, C++

    • for ENT 3618: Google Ads, Google Analytics (might want to take later in semester), Optional (advanced): Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optional Sections and Components

• • Complete additional profile sections (like Volunteer Experience, Honors & Awards, etc) tailored to career starters. Checklist (pdf). More info

  • Add more courses

  • Add other personal and school projects, no matter if they were finished or not. This is a great way to show off key skills and drive that companies are looking for.

Network Components

• • Connections: Make Connections with other people on LinkedIn

    • Connect with FGCU alumni

    • Connect with classmates

      • Post your profile to the chat for this class

      • Post your profile to an introduction discussion in future classes

  • Groups: Join a group like the FGCU Software Engineering group or Young Entrepreneur Connections or something you find from searching the group page

  • Follow: Follow influential members and groups like the School of Entrepreneurship. Similarities and Differences Between Following and Connecting 20 Best People To Follow On LinkedIn

  • Post: Make a post that your network will find valuable. That can include interesting articles as well as updates on your endeavors. Posts help you manage your brand and create opportunities. Your First Post on LinkedIn: Top 5 Tips From One Novice to Another. Check your post using the Coschedule Social Message Optimizer.

    • Like and comment on a few posts.

    • If you want to continue to be a presence, stay active, but avoid clogging your connections' feeds with overactivity — aim for at least twice weekly and no more than once per day. You can schedule posts using a tool like Buffer Publish.

  • Set Open to Work preferences to help you get recruited or market your services. Add the #OpenToWork photo frame if desired. This can be set to only show to recruiters or show to everyone. Getting Your LinkedIn Recruiter-Ready

  • Optional: Make & request Skills Endorsements

  • Optional: Make & request Recommendations

Bonus Opportunity and Assignment Submission Instructions

• • Participate in a "LinkedIn Review" Career Advising Appointment with the Career Development Services office (Cohen Center 160) and upload proof (like a picture or screenshot) and a short summary of the experience (5 point bonus)

    • Recorded Online Workshop (38:19)

  • Either post the link to your LinkedIn profile (if you don’t mind publicly sharing the information, at least until graded) or click “See more” on your Summary, expand all relevant sections, and then “Print” your profile to PDF and upload.