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Building an engineering portfolio to accompany your CV could support your career progression and job-hunting plans. A portfolio is a great way to present your experience in considerably more detail, giving you the chance to evidence your previous work to prospective employers. However, building a portfolio to ensure all information is clear and relevant can be a little tricky. Here are our tips on how to create an engineering portfolio.
Remember, you should only include an engineering portfolio as an addition to your overall job application or CV.
Think about the role you’re applying for
To make your portfolio as relevant and effective as possible, consider the engineering role you’re pursuing. Employers will want to see the information and experience that demonstrates your suitability for their role. You’ll want to create your portfolio with software that’s easy to edit on, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, that way you can edit according to specific roles you’re applying for. Look at the key skills that are required and then focus your portfolio on these.
A good way to do this is to draft each of the projects you’ve worked on (including images, descriptions, and additional information) and save them as individual files. Then when it comes to applying for your role, you can construct the portfolio using the various project snippets. This will make it much easier to review your previous experience and select examples to fit the role. Don’t forget to keep your project catalogue up to date each time you complete another project.
If you’re unsure about which projects will be relevant to present in your portfolio, look at the job description in more detail and pull out the keywords – perhaps they’re looking for experience working on large multi-million-pound projects, or an applied discipline within a highly specialist field.
Focus on your content
For each project outline the project scope and the role you played – how long you were on site and what stage of the project you supported. List out the services you delivered and any extra detailed information that can demonstrate technical skills.
Try to obtain written testimonials from key stakeholders on each project, to further endorse your experience.
Keep your descriptions brief
Remember to be brief and relevant when talking about your previous work – ideally having no more than one or two pages to describe each project.
Any additional information that you think is relevant should also be included. For example, this may also be a good place to highlight any tools or software you used during your time. It’s important to show your familiarity with a range of equipment and demonstrate built up experience.
Imagery
Where possible, include images to accompany each project. This is a great way to visually showcase your work experience. A potential format to follow would be to show your work on a project before and after you finished working on it – showing evidence of completed projects whilst also highlighting your skills.
Storing and sharing your engineering portfolio
Ideally, you want to store your document online - Microsoft OneDriveand Google Cloud are online storage accounts available to you for free. This allows easy access to your portfolio when you need to alter it for a prospective job application, and provides a shareable link to include in your CV. You should also save multiple versions of your portfolio to create an archive and make sure you’re not losing any past information.
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