What a professional portfolio should and could contain

Who you are

Your current position at your current institution

It should be clear that this is your personal page. Put your name in a large font at the top of the page. Follow it with your current position and your current institution. Link the name of your current institution to your departmental website.

Include a photograph of yourself. The photograph should be:

Of high enough resolution
Look professional, ideally showcasing you in a professional setting
Be useable elsewhere, for example when your institution wants to feature you in a news story, that photograph should be suitable to use.

Expertise

This is where you describe your areas of research and expertise. If you are a student, you can describe your research topic here. Along with your photograph and your current position, this will summarise who you are to the readers of the page. Consider adding images for illustration, for example astronomical images taken with a telescope whose data you are using, or a photograph of high-tech lab equipment you are using. The aim here is not to explain the science, which can lead to very complicated graphs, but to give the reader something illustrative to go with the description of your expertise.

Previous positions

This should list your previous positions. If you have a long career, you can max at 3 previous positions. The reason this is important, is that people may remember you from a previous position or institution and this will help them find you again.

Link to your latest CV. It should link to a pdf document of your latest academic CV. Where the document is located (google drive, dropbox, etc.) is not important, but it s important that you keep it up to date, as with this website.

Students

If you are supervising graduate students, it is important to show this. List your students, current and past, with the more recent students at the top of the list.

For each student, include their name, thesis title, degree and graduation date but no other identifier like student number, as that would infringe on protection of personal information.

You could link to their webpages if they have one, or indicate where they got hired after you supervised them. A supervisor's ability to place their graduates in good positions is also important to show.

Latest publications

Publications are important in academia and this is a good place to show the latest outputs of your research.

This is not meant to be an extensive list. If you have had a long career already, put at most the 5 latest publications.

Then, you can link to your Google Scholar profile. If you don't have one, set it up using your institutional email address, it is very useful and widely used. Other profiles you can link to are your ORCID profile and others you may be using, e.g. researchgate.net)

Courses taught

Teaching is an important part of academic life. This could be undergraduate or graduate courses. Important information on the courses taught is:

Course title
level, e.g. 3rd year MSc
Years taught. This will let you keep a record of previously taught courses and show teaching expertise.

Other information to include, if available is any links to course notes, recommended text books, and links to pages for the course if available. You could use your page for students to find this content as well.

Other achievements

If you have patents for example, you can list them here. Awards can also be listed. If you have authored a book, it is worthwhile mentioning. You could also mention conferences or workshops that you have co-organised as member of a local or scientific organising committee.

Always try to link the information to relevant pages, as this portfolio is supposed to give an overview of who you are but also allow people to dig deeper. This is a good way to lead your readers to good sources that confirm and give more detail about your achievements, as opposed to your papers that someone random has on a commercial peer-to-peer file sharing site for example.

Outreach

Outreach is an important element of an academic career. Therefore it is worthwhile listing your outreach activities here.

This is for example:

public talks
popular articles
radio interviews or podcasts
TV appearances.
community engagement and outreach programmes.

Everytime you list something, link to it. If what you have done doesn't have a webpage but there was a lot of buzz on social media for example, you could link to a result page for a hashtag search on twitter or something similar, but try to make sure the results are relevant to your activity.

On a personal note

If you are pursuing a passion outside of academia, you can include it in your portfolio. You can be a member in a band, or be passionate about mountain climbing gardening, photography, anything. Showing your personal side through a few words and a couple of images adds a personal touch to your portfolio and shows that there is more to you than your work.

Contact information

Include your institutional email address. It is most likely not necessary to mangle it (for example using _at_ instead of @) because it's an unpleasant experience if someone is trying to contact you and chances are that your email address is being used for spam already anyway. Hopefully your institution has a good spam filter.

List your social media accounts if you use them to talk about your research. Avoid it if you only post pictures of your kitten, though. It is best to put links to your social media with public pages, for example LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Avoid social networks that require a login to see your page, for example facebook or pinterest.

Availability

If you are eager to engage the media about your professional activities, this is a good place to indicate your availability. You can mention for example that you are available to discuss a particular topic in your field, or that you are available to speak to school learners about a topic or another. This will help people searching for experts, and probably give you a few outreach opportunities.

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