Presenting your Technical Communications portfolio

When seeking employment, make your portfolio samples easily accessible to those evaluating your services. Like most technical communication, this is easier said than done.

Post your work online

Hiring managers have little patience for delays when it comes to seeing proof of whether you can create the kind of content they need. Unless you want to drive to the company's offices and leave a custom copy of your portfolio at the reception desk, or pay rush charges to FedEx, it's wise to make relevant samples of your work available online.

Posting portfolio samples online demonstrates respect for the hiring manager's time, experience with the online-delivery process, and confidence that the manager will be impressed by what he or she sees.

Although you can always email the manager (or your recruiter) electronic samples, doing so isn't as efficient or professional as publishing relevant work samples to a web site you control, ideally via a password that you can share, and later change. A web-based portfolio lets you quickly steer the hiring manager's team to appropriate content, hide (using simple HTML "comment" tags) what isn't relevant or might embarrass, and still give readers as much time as they need to be dazzled.

Of critical importance, it also lets you...

Set the context for your portfolio

Regardless of how you deliver your work samples, these days you'll seldom get the opportunity actively to 'narrate' your technical communications portfolios. Typically, you'll be asked for relevant writing samples before the hiring manager agrees to interview you at all, and even at the interview your portfolio (assuming you've brought hardcopy or CD-based samples) usually circulates without your supervision.

In light of these facts, and the sad truth that pragmatism — the simple need to cope with insane deadlines, ineffective or nonextant SMEs, unusable products, and last-minute changes — affects every deliverable a technical communicator creates, very few candidates have more than a few portfolio samples of which they can be unflinchingly proud.

These factors make it vital that you set the context for every item in your technical communications portfolio. Especially if you seek technical writing work, we recommend that you create a cover note to preface each work sample with the following information:

1. What role did you play in creating it? Did you research it, write it from scratch, revise it (and if so why, and how substantially?), do a copy/production/developmental edit on it, proofread it, illustrate it, etc? Did you use the product yourself to fact-check your prose, or have to take the SME's word for things?


2. Under what circumstances was it created? Did you have all the resources you needed, including:
   1. cooperative subject matter experts from whom to gather information and to review your work
   2. a stable, accessible product
   3. a well-defined feature set
   4. a thorough understanding of your audience and its priorities
   5. optimal authoring tools
   6. plenty of time to format, edit, proofread, and index your work
   7. strong, supportive management who sheltered you from company politics
   
   
3. What do you consider its strengths and shortcomings? Do you like or find appropriate the writing's style? How about the document's scope, organization, and production values?


• What would you do differently next time?

If you don't include information about the context in which you created your portfolio samples, the hiring manager has every right to assume that you consider them your best work and will evaluate your skills accordingly.

No one expects you to create perfect work, but hiring managers warm to candidates who recognize suboptimal situations, prioritize their efforts intelligently, take responsibility for their deficiencies, and learn from their experience while remaining pragmatic about deadlines.

Ask for the chance to show more relevant work

Despite your efforts to match your portfolio samples with the hiring manager's requirements, it's possible that other examples of your work — those you opted not to show — will prove more relevant to the company's needs. It often pays to ask the hiring manager and your potential colleagues whether they would prefer to see other deliverables. If their concerns have been addressed by what you've already shown, great. But if they're undecided about your suitability for their needs, asking this question lets them get more specific or even change the job's scope or focus on the fly. If you don't ask, you'll never have the opportunity to show them how you can deliver their solution.

If the answer is "yes, I'd like to see more work like X," and you've done X, send it as soon as possible along with any appropriate disclaimers. If you've not done X, say so but explain how you would, making clear that you'd like the opportunity to create that deliverable.

For additional advice, see our articles on what should be in your Technical Communications portfolio, what to do when your portfolio's content is proprietary, and how to create a portfolio of developer-oriented documentation.

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