Happy July 4th holiday to everyone! As I prepared to celebrate our great nation’s birthday, I thought of how the Country’s independence should/could inspire your personal independence from a stalled career search. So, today’s post is fulfilling a promise that I made several weeks ago in one of my previous posts. So here we go…
You may remember that about a month and a half ago, I wrote a post titled, “Ten Steps to Creating an Awesome Career Portfolio.” As I closed out the post, I shared that you could make an even bigger impact on a potential employer by digitizing your portfolio. Well, as promised, I’m back with information on two ways of doing just that.
I’m sure that you agree…the quickest way, these days, to show an employer that you are a quick learner and that your skills are current is to flex your technical prowess. Moreover, guess what, unless your career field of choice is the technology industry, you don’t even have to have a degree in computer technology to impress. In fact, I have a close friend who has three years of college in a non-technological field but has worked for well-known organizations and has often been able to command higher salaries, in some cases, than multi-degreed technology professionals because of her knowledge and command of her field. She has written programs, macros, etc.
The three ways that I am going to share with you today for digitizing or automating your career portfolio are: 1) Google Drive; 2) a Personal Website; or 3) Blog Site.
GOOGLE DRIVE is the quickest and easiest option for digitizing your career portfolio. The only prerequisite is that you must have Gmail email address. It is free to set up a Gmail address and it takes only a couple of minutes. Another great thing about Gmail is that every one of their email addresses comes with a certain amount of Google Drive storage each month. So you can easily save, store, access, and share files with others, no matter which email provider they subscribe to. You can even save drafts of documents as files to Google Drive. Once your Gmail email address is ready for use, identify the documents that you will include in your career portfolio. Create a folder on your flash drive, computer hard drive, tablet or other storage device and save all the documents in that folder. You can name the folder a name that will be easy to remember or to associate with the contents or purpose of the file. Next, access Google Drive from within your Gmail email account by clicking on the Google apps
icon. From there click on the Google Drive icon. You will then have the ability to create folders; upload folders from your storage sources to Google Drive; or upload single files. Once you have uploaded your career portfolio files to your Google Drive, you will be able to share the folder with potential employers. Now, how easy was that?!
Your very own PERSONAL WEBSITE is another great way to digitize your career portfolio. With a personal website, you can give it an appealing design by changing the colors, fonts, and layout. You can also easily replace dated documents or add new documents to your website. You can choose a theme that enables a carousel I which you can feature certain documents that you are especially proud of, or that represent career-impacting projects that you have worked on. Another neat feature of a personal website is that it will have its very own web address or URL that you can include in cover letters, your email address stamp, on business cards, etc. For example, during my own successful career search, I invited potential employers to visit my blog site by including the URL in my cover letters and by including the URL at the top of all of my career search documents by including it as a part of my contact information along with my Linkedin profile address.
A BLOG SITE can also act as a career profile. For instance, because I am a Human Resources professional and because my blog is related to human resources, I let my blog do some of the talking for me during my successful career search. Unlike with a personal career site, I did not need to upload examples of my work projects to my blog site. Instead, I used my physical career portfolio in the traditional way; however, until I got invited for an in-person interview, I linked my cover letter content to my blog site. Since the majority of my posts are related to human resources topics and the career search process, they spoke for me and served as sort of an electronic pre-interview career portfolio. So by reading my blog, potential employers were able to get a great feel for my written communication skills, as well as my knowledge of, and passion for the field of Human Resources.
I hope you see that there are many acceptable, creative ways to present your knowledge, skills, and abilities in front of your employer of choice. These are but three great ideas to achieve your mission. Try one or more of these and see won’t that one single tweak to your career search catapult you to the next level in the career search process and get you that coveted interview invite. I dare you…try it! Then share your success story with me. You’ll have your new job in no time, I betcha. Go get your new job.
For more career search tips, visit my products and resources page, at https://nnamtique.com/resources and join my FaceBook group when I launch it about two weeks from now.
Talk with you soon.
