The Power of a Creative Portfolio in Your Job Search

By Janice Yu Cheng

 I am in terrific company here on the blog for the Commission for Global Dimensions of Student Development. You can find valuable personal anecdotes and evidence-based advice on a variety of topics related to the experience of international students in the United States and U.S. student affairs professionals abroad. I offer my own story to this collection and hope that my experience with using creative portfolios as a powerful job search tool can be as informative as some of the other posts here!

Talk the talk, but also show it.

I first learned about portfolios in junior high school. At the time, my mother was halfway through obtaining her master’s degree in social work, and we were living in a pleasant suburb half an hour’s drive north of Detroit. Our life there was completely different from the one we had previously in Taipei, Taiwan, and despite my mother’s best efforts my proficiency in English started to overtake my native Mandarin at this time.

Our school library invited local businessowners and professionals for a Career Day, where us eighth graders got to sit down with a working adult for a mock interview. Our language arts teacher helped us put together a collection of our academic and extracurricular work (as expansive as any regular 13-year-old could conjure) to show our mock interviewers.

Picture: Your portfolio can take on many forms across multiple mediums; choose the one that works best for you! The biggest piece in my graduate school portfolio is the poster for my master's thesis presentation.

It was the first time I learned to look at my student life as a career, and how to represent that career through curated pieces of my achievements. My portfolio served as a visual map of my progress as a student and as a growing adolescent, and also tracked how I acquired new skills and overcame obstacles. The satisfaction of completing a portfolio is like admiring a wall you built yourself, brick by brick by brick. I was hooked.

Though I didn’t grasp the full significance of this experience until much later in life, the importance of maintaining a portfolio had become ingrained. After my mother finished her master’s program, we moved back to Taiwan and I completed high school. In the fall of 2010, I returned to the United States for my own college degree, this time in upstate New York.

When I chose to study Creative Writing and Japanese, portfolio-making became a regular aspect of life. I maintained an exhaustive collection of fictional stories long and short, poetry average and terrible (I could only produce two kinds), and the same from my classwork in Japanese. I kept every assignment, every essay, and every half-written draft leading up to the final graded version. I did it because I loved the bird’s eye view of my personal progress the portfolio granted me.

Picture: Putting a portfolio together can seem tiresome, but if you do it piece by piece continuously throughout your career, it won't be too time-consuming. I spent many afternoons like this in my favorite study room on Binghamton University's downtown campus, cleaning up files and organizing physical copies in color-coded binders.

What I didn’t expect was how handy my portfolios proved to be when I applied for jobs. When employers asked for an example of a soft skill, like how well I worked as part of a team, I could point to a group project in my portfolio and clearly demonstrate which parts required collaboration and which pushed me to take on a leadership role. When an interviewer asked about an obstacle I’ve experienced and how I overcame it, I could show them a research paper that I was particularly proud of, and the eight revisions it took to get to the final draft. I can’t overstate the significance of being able to pull out an accordion folder and produce physical evidence of the fancy skills described on my resume. International students who are looking to pursue a career in the United States are well aware that they need to impress wherever they can, and my portfolio was the ace up my sleeve.

And it worked! My first “big girl” office job was with the department that oversaw continuing education programs at my university. My supervisors were excited to see tangible proof of the “excellent written and verbal communication skills” that was in my cover letter, which I could provide with the portfolio from the internship I had just completed. The portfolio I kept while at this job landed me my next position, of which I was hired at the end of the first interview because, according to my supervisor some time later, I was the only candidate who brought a portfolio as evidence of my skillset. “You showed me what you could do,” she said. “You didn’t just talk about it.”

Though my portfolio is now on an external hard drive and not in an accordion folder, it continues to be the most powerful professional asset I have. No matter what your chosen career field may be, your portfolio can be your most faithful ally during a nerve-racking interview. It’s a collection of how you have grown throughout your career, a showcase of your strengths, and a record of how you learned from mistakes to improve. Perhaps most importantly for me, my portfolio is also a friendly voice whenever my imposter syndrome kicks in or when I feel daunted by the job hunt as a foreigner in the U.S. That’s when my portfolio says, “You got this. See? You’ve already done it before.”

Bio of Janice Yu Cheng

Before attending Binghamton University for a bachelor’s in Creative Writing, Janice Yu Cheng never imagined she would be spending close to a decade living in upstate New York. As it goes, she continued her studies to graduate in 2016 with a Master’s of Public Administration, concentrating in student affairs in higher education. She currently works at Wells College as the Admissions Communications Manager, fusing her passion for student affairs and marketing and communications.