Chaffey | CoopEd | Handbook | End-of-Term
Your purpose in doing this project is to learn how to create and use your own personalized career portfolio in order to accelerate your career growth in today’s mobile and evolving work place. Use it to assess your skills and priorities, set career goals and organize a multimedia archive of your life/work accomplishments. By learning to assemble, reassemble, modify and use it to focus your career research and job hunt on evolving opportunities, you will acquire a powerful, multi-purpose career planning and self-marketing tool.
Email Follow-up: You are required to keep your instructor informed, with at least one email regarding your progress on this project. You will be given a schedule of due dates for all assignments.
Project Assignments: The number of units for which you are enrolled in this course will determine the number of modules and criteria that your instructor selects for your project, and the number of videos you are to watch. After receiving your project assignment, you may want to review the examples of successful projects that are available in the Career Services Office.
Project Goals
Produce/update your career resume.
Assemble a comprehensive collection of documents representing tangible evidence or artifacts of your accomplishments, skills and other career-related assets.
Obtain letters of recommendation, testimonials or other evaluations of your work, school or community contributions, capabilities and/or accomplishments.
Write your personal mission statement, describing the current focus of your career research and/or job search, in the context of what you hope to achieve long term.
Learn about the career field in which the portfolio is to be used.
Identify your skill preferences; write descriptions of your experiences using them; and identify occupations that use them.
Goal #1: Produce/Update your career resume.
Your resume is the centerpiece of your portfolio. It summarizes the current focus of your job search or career research, and presents to your audience, in text form, your qualifications for the work you seek. The education, experience, skills and accomplishments listed there should be supported by the recommendations, documentation and examples of your work contained elsewhere in your portfolio
Criteria:
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Goal #2: Assemble a comprehensive collection of documents representing tangible evidence or artifacts of your accomplishments, skills and other career-related assets.
Create a repository for the documents that represent your proudest moments. Think about the significance of each item and the story you would tell about it in an interview – for information or for a job. Application for employment, admission to university and other forms of registration may ask you to provide detailed information about your past employment, education, military service and other pertinent facts about you, along with the documents to prove them. Organize them into logical categories, and store them here. Create a table of contents to make it easier to turn quickly to the document you want at the moment you need it; the result will be a more polished presentation with less fumbling. If you leave a copy of your portfolio for a person to review in your absence, they will find your table of contents indispensable.
Criteria:
The following videos may be viewed in the Career Services office:
Submit copies of:
Required documents:
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Goal #3: Obtain new letters of recommendation, testimonials or other evaluations of your work, school or community contributions, capabilities and/or accomplishments..
Future portfolio reviewers will want to know what others who have worked with you have to say about your qualifications, character and work habits in the various situations in which you contributed your talent and energy. These letters may be the strongest evidence of your contributions. Request them when things are going well, such as after satisfying accomplishments, rather than only when you are leaving a job.
Criteria:
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Goal #4: Write your personal mission statement, describing the current focus of your career research and/or job search, in the context of what you hope to achieve long term.
Develop, in advance, an expression of your own unique perspective on your career, in your preferred style and mode of expression or by the overall design of your portfolio. Thoughtful preparation, and practice in speaking about your personal mission statement can help you feel more prepared for, and more effective in, the important conversations and interviews which lie ahead.
Criteria:
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Goal #5: Develop/demonstrate familiarity with the career field in which you will use your portfolio.
Get to know where those professionals whom you will want to critique your portfolio – and eventually to interview you for employment - are to be found, in both the ‘real world’ and in the virtual world of the Internet. Become conversant with the issues that concern them and learn where they congregate, so you will know where to seek them out and how to interact with them on relevant issues. Your preparation will maximize the value of time spent with them, whether on-line or in-person.
Criteria:
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Goal #6: Identify your preferred skills; write descriptions of your experiences using them; and identify occupations that use them.
What you derive from developing the professional language to use when describing your favorite skills, with examples of how you have used them, can be useful in writing your resume, enhancing your career portfolio or improving your performance in job or informational interviewing situations. You may also want to learn how to search the Choices CT Occupational data base for occupations which use your skills in order to identify career options which you may want to research.
Criteria: (Use the Choices career planning software to do the following activities)
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Appendix
Career Portfolio Resources
Print (available in the Career Services office)
Videotape (available in the Career Services office)
Links