10).Step 3 - Creating Your Profile: Your portfolio

It should be no surprise that experience is key in helping you land freelance projects. In fact,employers do not prioritize your skills and knowledge as much as how you have applied those skills and knowledge to your occupation. It is important to convince prospective employers we  can do a given  task by what we have done previously.

First we have to brainstorm work experience for your portfolio.

Keep in mind that your
work experience isn’t a list of any particular job positions you may have had, but
instead
evidence of challenging projects or tasks you faced
while at a particular

job, at college or wherever.

The following are types of experience that can be used:
• Direct work experience, especially difficult or challenging projects or assignments
• Projects you have done on your own time, not necessarily for money
• Particularly difficult projects from classes or group projects
• Past internships

If you get the idea here, anything constructively done that is related to your career field can count as your work experience and it does not necessarily have to be from a paying job. Just remember,though,it has to prove you can do the tasks required on a given project.

still believe you have done nothing to count as experience? Then go out and create it yourself!

How? Here are some suggestions to get started:
• Volunteer to intern for a local business
• Volunteer to local charity or non-profit organization and offer your services
• Create projects (i.e. website, essay article, short movie, etc.) for family members.
They will always be your best “employers” even if they may not always pay you.
• If certifications are available for your field, work to obtain them

In addition, check out this article on
building a portfolio without professional experience
.
Let’s now take a moment to brainstorm and write down a list of any relevant experience
using the points listed above. We don’t have to get into them in great detail just yet but
remember to write down challenging tasks. Make a list of
everything
that comes to mind.
You just may dig up something long forgotten from the back of your head.
. . .
A good list should contain a minimum of six examples of experience in your career field.
Hopefully you have at least six, but don’t worry if you don’t. You can always continue
brainstorming later or add on future experience as it happens.
Now that we a list to start with, it is time to find a sample that documents every example of
our experience. It needs to be in or is able to convert into a digital form for us to use here
such as document, text, image or excel files. It is also very important that your samples
reflect the level of difficulty of your experience.
A sample can be any of the following:

• Writing samples
• Code samples
• Research papers
• Images and graphics
• Scanned photographs, brochures and other documents
• Plans, reports and drawings
• Websites (create a thumbnail image of them)
For each experience sample, do the following:

1.Open a new Word document and save it with a descriptive name for the sample.
2.Create a cover page which contains a title for the sample (e.g. “Logo Graphic for XYZ Company”), a brief description and briefly explain any particular challenges that were solved in the process.

If your sample is a website, include the url and stick on the thumbnail image. You can skip the next step, too.
3.Insert the sample into the document, if it fits on the page. Otherwise add a line break then add your sample to the following page(s).

The point of creating separate documents for each sample is
that you will not submit them all to a potential employer. You
will submit only the
relevant
ones for the project you will
bid on.

Let’s go ahead and compile your work experience summaries for your portfolio. Then we’ll
be ready to take it to the next step... looking for jobs and making some money!