She was the fourth candidate the panel had interviewed today. The traditional opening questions were fired at her: Tell me about yourself? Where are you from, why do you want to work at our school? Could you describe your teaching style for us as well?
Lynn squirmed just a bit and then deftly produced a booklet as she replied with an air of mystery: I consider each child a unique being. Each one is like a blank slate, a blank page. In fact, this booklet would represent my class at the beginning of the school year.
As Lynn continued to thumb the blank pages of her portfolio, she elaborated: After I work with the students on study skills, assist them to master the basic skills of reading, writing and listening, the pages begin to fill. I spend time counseling with students and their families. We work through the rough spots and the low spots until we all can stand tall together.
Lynn closed the book, paused and looked up. Then she thumbed the pages again, this time very slowly, and, as she did, the pages filled with the colorful images of her students as she concluded: At the end of the year, they leave my room full of new ideas, full of a new sense OF Possibilities.
Lynn asked with a smile: Would you like to see any of the samples?
Their jaws dropped, they all nodded enthusiastically, and one of the interview panelists managed to quip, “How did you do that?”
Lynn started performing magic in her classes because her deaf students responded strongly to lessons laced with visual qualities of legerdemain. Lynn gravitated from an amateur, part-time magician to professional, summer-time magician, and she eventually joined the International Brotherhood of Magicians. This story is told to illustrate that every job seeker has some magic to share, and a portfolio may be one of the finest props around for bringing the magic to life.
Today, this portfolio magic is finding its way into every facet of career development. In the last ten years, more and more books and articles have described new formats and new uses for career portfolios. These include enhancing student learning, expanding one’s presentation skills during an interview, and transforming routine employee evaluation checklists and performance reviews into genuine dialogue about shared goals. The emerging power of a career portfolio will be discussed in light of it’s ability to transform recent developments in career portfolios, current experiments, and visions for the future.
REVIEWING CAREER PORTFOLIO HISTORY
In the mid 1990′s people began taking a second look at the artists’ portfolio and realized that it could be re-configured as a job search tool. Books and articles were published extolling the virtues of the career portfolio and soon it was recognized that the portfolio could become a power piece during the job interview as well as other applications. As the Internet and multimedia software gained popularity in the 1990s, more and more books and articles discussed the possibilities of a digital portfolio distributed over the net or displayed as a multi-media document on screen.
Also in the early 1990s, I hinted at the possibilities of using a portfolio as a tool to serve diverse career development needs in my book Portfolio Power (now out of print). The book examined early experiments where portfolios were used in colleges as a vehicle for awarding credit for prior learning. The Canadians pioneered this concept with their Prior Learning Assessment, in which students were granted credit for prior work experience based on a portfolio demonstrating mastery of various course skills. This allowed people returning to college for re-training to complete their education in the shortest possible time. This idea was also developed in the United States, but on a smaller scale.
There are also other experimental uses of the career portfolio. One chapter outlined the use of portfolio as an outplacement tool for military personnel. People exiting the service were encouraged to assemble a “brag book” which bore a remarkable resemblance to a portfolio. A few pioneers toyed with the idea of weaving the portfolio into employee evaluation and succession planning. Now that trend is expanding.
All of these early experiments are beginning to take root in the new century. The superficial “drive-by” evaluation process is being thrown out in favor of a process which promotes dialogue about shared contributions. A career portfolio further enhances the process because it should end with a reflective summation. This concluding page sums up how the year has gone for the employee and discuss his or her future career development needs.
As employee and supervisor engage in their joint career planning, they share in drawing up a career blueprint which expands the vision of the employee’s potential. By planning together, the employee and supervisor begin to see how individual career development can dovetail with the organization’s goals. This development of a shared vision can then strengthen their commitment to one another, resulting in improved performance and satisfaction for all involved.
EXPANDING THE DEFINITION AND USES OF CAREER PORTFOLIOS
The portfolio represents an attempt to communicate ideas using words AND pictures, as well as the entire array of multi-media possibilities (sound, animation, net surfing, etc). This broadband definition of a portfolio means it can take the form of a visual proposal, a brochure, or a scrapbook-like traditional portfolio displayed either in print or in digital format (e.g.; PowerPoint(r), PDF(r) files, multimedia documents).
Unfortunately, too many people have created samples of “portfolios” which fall far short of it’s dynamic possibilities. For instance, many people have simply assumed that adding links to a resume turns the text document into a portfolio. Therefore, it is important to note what does not constitute a career portfolio. A career portfolio is not a resume or text-bound document with links to yet more text or sites.
Rather, the career portfolio document or presentation conveys it’s high-impact message with a blend of white space, words, and graphic elements. In this brave new communication world, the effective communicator will attend to the formatting and design as well as the content and words of the document. In the end, the career portfolio must include samples of one’s work. And if the individual is changing careers, then it is appropriate to include examples of work one is capable of performing, which means the samples can come from hobbies, volunteer jobs, or other learning experiences.
With all of these possibilities and options, it is clear that the career portfolio can be used for more than job interviewing. Likewise, the career portfolio obviously is no longer limited to paper since it can be projected on-screen or distributed via the Internet. Today, the person who takes charge of his or her career is limited only by imagination. While the career portfolio can be shown during a job interview, perhaps its most creative aspects take shape when it is used creatively to promote a new idea or work assignment, as a tool for employee evaluation, or as part of the process of succession and retirement planning.
Thinking about a career portfolio in this expanded manner suggests that the portfolio may at times become a hybrid document. As it takes on larger roles, it no longer contains only work samples. For instance, when used to accompany a proposal for a new job or venture, it might also contain an analysis of customer needs, lists of current problems, and examples of comparative services. When used to augment succession planning, the retiree’s portfolio may be more focused on the future rather than the past. Likewise, the portfolio might also contain suggestions for improving the job for the retiree’s replacement. At this point the portfolio speaks to one’s legacy and promise. In this light, the portfolio can begin to take on the look and feel of a business plan, a project proposal, scrapbook, or brochure,
Consider an example where a person has an idea for the kind of work he wants to do, but lacks a job offer. In this instance, he might use the portfolio to market a proposal to his present employer or a brand new business. Suppose a sales representative notes the increasing amount of returns after Christmas because customers too often receive duplicate products or incorrect versions. This salesman also wants to expand his reach online. He comes up with a proposal for an online gift registry which insures that people buy a product the recipient truly needs. The portfolio could contain a mini proposal and samples of work which illustrate how the online gift registry could be created. Naturally, examples of the salesman’s ability to initiate and create this service would need to be included in this hybrid business plan/career portfolio.
In the final analysis, expanding the definition or role of a career portfolio means enlarging our own sense of what we do at work. As a result, supervisors must be willing to embrace a new approach for assisting employees in evaluating their skills and planning for advancement. Innovative enterprises will use the career portfolio to re-structure the staff’s relationships on the job, and hopefully in the process, everyone will find their work more meaningful and their efforts more effective.
Career Portfolios Breathe New Life Into The Employee Evaluation Process
Too often the employee evaluation resembles more of a dreaded chore rather than a career development or organizational growth opportunity. Supervisors rely on checklists or canned protocols. Employees often feel undervalued or like victims rather than as partners. In contrast, when an employee meets with his or her supervisor at the beginning of the year to discuss shared goals, they can fashion a shared vision for the work to be done. An evaluator can discuss the organization’s goals for the year, and then translate them into terms which relate to the employee’s job description. The question becomes, “What are some ways you can help us reach these goals, and how might that be demonstrated?” And the answer is a blueprint for the employee’s portfolio.
In this scenario, the employee takes responsibility for documenting his or her contribution. However, the portfolio should not be limited only to the discussion since one’s contributions to any organization often follow a spontaneous unfolding of events where new needs arise. Likewise, as employees develop new ways of improving services or products, they should catalogue them for the review time. To keep it flexible, the employer and employee could meet briefly on a regular basis to review, update, and change goals. These goals would then become the backbone to the employee evaluation rubric which would be used for judging the portfolio.
Along the way, an organization would come to understand more about what its employees really do on the job. This new knowledge could then be used to improve job descriptions. For example, at Tulsa Tech several custodians put samples in their portfolio showing duties that went far beyond indoor maintenance. One individual had become the organization’s public address system expert. Whenever speakers came, he organized all the supporting sound and lighting systems for the presentation. Another person tended to spend most of his time in a shipping and receiving function. Yet, both people worked under the title of “custodian.”
To retain these skilled people, the organization will next have to honor their contribution by changing their job titles and job descriptions. This will prove especially important should either employee leave due to retirement or promotion and need to be replaced. Giving an employee the opportunity to inject his career portfolio into the evaluation process acknowledges real contributions and keeps the organization healthy.
Using a portfolio to foster a shared evaluation process, helps the organization communicate the goal of continuous improvement in products, services, and staff. The career portfolio becomes a living history of the employee’s accomplishments and a record of demonstrated competencies. All of this documentation can become an individual’s passport for sustaining or advancing their career within the organization. The supervisor’s role expands as he or she evaluates the “raw” material in the portfolio during the performance evaluation process. Thus the supervisor helps the employee discover what s/he can do to contribute to success, identify their skill-deficiencies, and then create a step-by-step action plan for closing the gaps.
Portfolio Planning As A Tool For Succession Planning and Internal Recruitment The retirement of baby boomers is like the weather: everyone talks about it, but nobody seems to be able to do anything proactive about it. Again, organizations should consider using a career portfolio to help with this knotty problem.
Just as the employee can take the initiative for a new idea and communicate the proposal with a portfolio, the employer can initiate change using the portfolio to structure the process. Today many managers are concerned about the growing numbers of “soon-to-be-retirees” in their organization. Knowing that the labor pool may be shrinking in the future, they must take creative approaches to replacing future employees. This topic has been discussed under the title of “succession planning.” Some organizations have taken the lead by experimenting with new approaches to recruiting from within the organization when they can’t find enough talent outside of the business or institution. In this scenario, the portfolio can assist in identifying employees with the potential to move up into higher levels of responsibility. This allows the organization to replace them with the more generic entry-level worker.
One manager might take a proactive approach by helping her subordinates evaluate their current skill-set and then projecting how they might gain additional training and experiences to move up in the organization. In the process of reviewing an employee’s portfolio she might discover that the old job titles no longer adequately describe what that employee is currently responsible for on the job. Realizing that her office assistant is now helping with evaluating employee training needs and planning on-site learning experiences, she decides to change the job title from “office assistant” to “workforce development coordinator.” In this fashion, the employer honors the employee’s creativity and contributions by upgrading her title and status.
This process can be extended to people about to retire from the organization. For instance, a supervisor or human resource staff member could ask a retiree to assist in re-engineering his or her job. If the relationship is positive, they might even invite the retiree to become a mentor and play a role similar to what a college calls a professor emeritus. Perhaps, the long-working person could be asked to create a transition portfolio which would be jointly reviewed in a final exit interview.
This portfolio not only sums up what the person has contributed, but also suggests how the departing individual thinks the job could be expanded or changed in the future. Future plans in the world of work could include an examination of working free-lance or part time as well as other forms of volunteer work and leisure activities. This process helps the employee prepare mentally for the transition out of the organization. As a result, the employee feels cared for and will probably want to do all that he or she can to insure a successful transition at the work site. It is suggested that this process might benefit all parties involved, and would certainly offer an alternative (or addition) to the traditional farewell luncheon and “roast”.
After helping employees to plan their transition, the next step involves reviewing the portfolios of existing staff to identify talented and competent people who are often overlooked because they lack the “necessary” academic credentials. Too often the very competent and capable technical functionaries find themselves overlooked or falling victim to downsizing, rightsizing or capsizing. When managers or human resource people review a portfolio at work they are prompted to take a deeper look at their bank of employees. This could help to re-discover previously ignored talent among the non-degreed, certified, or support staff.
As people search for new ways to enhance employee recruitment, evaluation, and retention, they increasingly find that career portfolios can play a useful role in their organization. The use of a career portfolio in the work site is limited only by the imaginations of the people involved. Recently, Tulsa Technology Centers began to explore the these possibilities. Some of their experiences will help to further illustrate the possibilities.
MAKING HISTORY AT THE TULSA TECHNOLOGY CENTER
At Tulsa Technology Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a leadership team is taking the first steps to conjure up a new way of working with the career portfolios. Stories from this pioneering effort help describe and understand how to begin bringing career portfolios into the workplace and their potential impact on the lives of individuals and the organizations they work for.
Barbara Hagy heads the Portfolio Project Team which is charged with developing a portfolio system to document employee training. The team’s charge began with a single goal from the school district’s strategic plan but it has expanded to much more. The project team, which is comprised of a broad cross section of staff and faculty, developed a timeline for implementing a system using career portfolios with all staff members in the district, including support staff on all shifts. The initial group would receive training in personal portfolio development and this cadre would be instrumental in developing a training plan for the rest of the district.
Approximately fifty individuals participated in a two-day training event. Initially the biggest challenge was to release fifty staff members from classrooms, warehouses, and office functions. Follow up training evaluations showed that this progressive decision to model inclusiveness was a big success with staff. The following case studies begin with the workshop experience and continue through the current effort to infuse career portfolios for both staff (and eventually students) at the Tulsa Technology Centers.
Case Study #1-David Sets The Stage For Expanding His Career Path
David, a custodial staff member, was somewhat apprehensive about attending the workshop. Even though he has completed his associate degree and would like to pursue other career options, he was unsure about joining professional staff members in a training session. Following the training session and the hands-on computer time, David’s portfolio page reflected a new sense of pride in his achievements. David is developing confidence to explore other career opportunities within the district and his portfolio will help him identify his skill gaps for pursuing those opportunities. David’s portfolio, initially developed for evaluation purposes, has evolved into a tool for personal career development.
Another benefit was that David’s son-in-law mentioned that he was to prepare a portfolio for his Architectural Engineering program. Through his discussion about his own portfolio experience, David became a mentor to his son-in-law, even though David had far less education. David was just one example of support staff members who seemed to express a new found sense of pride in their work following the development of just one portfolio page.
Case Study #2-Georgia Plans For More Training and Education
Georgia is a secretary and she wants to enter vocational coordination/education. She knows that she must identify a job target and then analyze her skill gaps. Georgia then plans to conduct field research by gathering advice from people in the field, college advisors, and those who want to support her transition. Her portfolio will therefore use a compare and contrast sequence as she exhibits work samples reflecting her current position, transferable skills she can take with her to the next position, and finally an education plan to bridge the skill gap between her present and future position.
A future goal of Tulsa Technology Center’s project team is that every employee will use his or her job description as the foundation for portfolio development. Their portfolio will showcase how they meet the requirements of their position. Together with their supervisor, they will review the employee’s job performance as it relates to their job description. Perhaps, if Georgia was hired as a teacher, one of the skills listed on her job description could be the “ability to be a productive team member.” Her portfolio would demonstrate how she possessed those particular skills. A rather “soft” skill becomes measurable in the evaluation process through the use of portfolios.
Case Study #3-Stacy Plans For Her Successor
Stacy will retire soon and hopes that her replacement can have an opportunity to expand the scope of the job. She has worked for many years in the mail operations department. She has always felt that the position could be expanded to reflect the new technologies now available for distributing packages and information. Stacy has been asked to put together a portfolio documenting what she currently does and proposing what her replacement might do in a re-engineered position. Stacy is planning to show how the new mailroom coordinator position could be re-titled as Information and Product Distribution Coordinator. This would involve using new technologies for scanning and labeling incoming and outgoing products, using email to conduct surveys or virtual focus group discussions at the behest of department managers, and help to enhance or coordinate training on the email system. In addition, Stacy suggests that the school start a program to train students in this work, and in the process turn the department into a training site.
Case Study #4-George Focuses On His Legacy And His Career Renewal
George is a curriculum designer at the mid-management level where he serves various school sites in the Tulsa organization. He is getting ready to retire at the end of the school year. He is creating a portfolio to use in the transition to his next work. He is well liked by his peers and directors. They are all well aware of his early experiences in the military and his current involvement in community service organizations.
The person he reports to suggested that his portfolio contain a section showcasing his 20 years work in the military, another section on his work contribution to the local Rotary Club, and a description illustrating how he moved up from instructor to administrator. The portfolio consultant helped George envision a possible cover for his portfolio. It will be three mountain tops, representing his climb to the pinnacle in each of his three career areas.
George walked away from these portfolio workshops and consultations with a new sense of purpose. If he is called upon to mentor his replacement or serve as an advisor to the board of directors, it is highly likely that he will invest himself in these opportunities as well.
THE FUTURE IS NOW
A columnist at the Seattle-Times once wryly observed, “The future is never what it is supposed to be.” He was reminiscing about the Jetsons and the hype surrounding high technology. The urge to dream about robots doing housework and commuting by aircraft devices is tantalizing, but the reality of taking out the garbage remains both a concrete and symbolic reality.
At the same time, recent digital trends suggest that the portfolio is here to stay and probably will come to play a much larger role in our career development practices. For example, think back to the Internet before the emergence of the World Wide Web. In the 80s and early 90s the Internet was mostly email and ftp sites. People navigated with complex Unix codes, and the “virtual community” was quite small. Once the visual elements of point-and-click buttons and pictures, animation and sound arrived, the Internet became a wild and wooly frontier. It seemed that one mouse-click was worth a 1000 Unix commands.
By the same token, resumes and cover letters are the communication tools of the last century. Today, we can send our words, our picture, and even our voice across the wire. Rather than just use words to describe our work, we can now add scanned images from the work site. Instead of asking the employer to believe the lines of our resumes and checklists in evaluations, we can show actual work samples. In other words, one portfolio artifact is possibly worth a thousand words found in a job application-resume-letter-evaluation form.
Portfolios are a visual medium, the vehicle of NOW. Portfolios are not just a fad. And if you let your imagination go, you can use the portfolio to conjure up the same magic Lynn used in her job interview. To paraphrase Joyce Lain Kennedy, the guru of technology-based job search, one can use a portfolio to give a “show stopper” performance and in the process start down a new path of opportunity.
|
I’ve been lucky to have many books and articles published, and more recently my images have been distributed online and in print. Along the pathway, I’ve won awards for teaching, playwriting, essays, and now photography. My teaching experience spans classrooms in prisons, colleges, public schools, and a variety of retreat settings where I conduct workshops. My current teaching and coaching interests include journaling about photographs, Photoshop & PhotoArt coaching, career portfolios, leisure wellness, and retirement lifestyle planning. I have lived in Tumwater, Washington for almost 30 years. My wife Judy and dog Franky really enjoy the Pacific Northwest. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Martin_Kimeldorf |
|
