What’s in My Garage: Getting My Career Portfolio Up To Date

Last Sunday I had my last Career Development Facilitator class where we each presented a project and talked about our career portfolios. First, about my project...

I created a sample career development program for a community college that helps students choose a major or program offered by the college that matches their interests, using The Career Key. Essentially, a customized list of programs. So when you take The Career Key test and get your results, you could then see your own college’s programs organized by Holland type and Career Key work group, the same way we organize careers.  See an example for the Artistic personality type from The Education Key e-Book.

The project was fun (believe it or not) but took some time so I haven’t been able to blog or tweet much recently.

Then my class talked about Career Portfolios, a way of organizing your career planning information like self-assessment results, resumes, letters of recommendation, etc. Activities you complete from “Learn More About Yourself” would go in it.

What I found, in preparing for my class, is that my career portfolio didn’t really exist, much less in a single place.  I have bits and pieces of my career self all over the place.  Here are some random things I collected from my home office and the garage:

• Strong Interest Inventory and MBTI results from 1989 (wow, who knew I carried those out here to the West Coast from NC where I grew up?)
• My Career Key assessment results
• My college transcript (a little scary to see how little I remember about my coursework)
• Writing samples from my first year of law school
• Research memos I wrote in my first legal job
• Copy of articles I wrote for local legal publications
• My resume and cover letters for my last two jobs 
• Photographs from my last job at a law enforcement agency (you've got to love uniforms!)
• Certificates of completion for training courses

The list goes on. And you likely have similar random things lying around that seen alone, may not mean much. But when you put these things together, you see valuable insights into your career planning process:

• patterns about yourself,
• things that you enjoyed (or not so much),
• accomplishments you’d forgotten,
• “good experiences” - things you’ve done that you enjoyed and are proud of...

Gathering scraps of paper about my life was very helpful for self-exploration.  A reminder of the things I’m passionate about, the things that have changed about me, and about new things I want to do.

What’s in your garage?