5 Reasons Your Portfolio Should be Online
by George Couros • • 0 Comments
“My prediction is that in the next ten years, resumes will be less common, and your online presence will become what your resume is today, at all types and sizes of companies.” Dan Schawbel, 2011
Having a conversation with teachers and administrators, I asked how many of them still had “paper portfolios”. Surprisingly, it was over half of the room, and many of them had developed it in university, updating it only when job opportunities arose. I remember actually having a paper portfolio and applying for jobs, and hating the process of dusting off a binder, adding a ton of great information into it, only to walk into an interview and have the person hiring not even look at it. It was extremely frustrating as I had put a lot of work into it, only to have it ignored, and I never really understood why.
And then I became a principal.
When I would look at applicants for interviews and have a limited amount of time to talk with them and interact, the thought of flipping through a binder with them sitting in the room in front of me, seemed a little ludicrous. I wanted to spend as much time getting to know them as possible. At the end of the interview, sometimes they would offer to leave the portfolio with me to peruse at my leisure and they would either come back to pick it up or I would have to mail it (does anyone go to the post office anymore?). I might have been the exception in my process a few years ago, but this is becoming more of the norm now, not only in education, but all aspects. A portfolio could be great for the process of an interview, but shouldn’t the things you do help you get the interview in the first place? Sending mass binders out to