A professional portfolio is one of the best ways for a professional to showcase their knowledge, skills and experience in their field. Educators will learn the value of a portfolio for job acquisition and career development as they work through the content and format of their own personal and professional portfolio.

Developing a Professional Portfolio

What is a Professional Portfolio?

Organized collections of work compiled for a specific purpose related to the demonstration of one’s learning, skills, and accomplishments.

They contain purposefully organized documentation that clearly demonstrates specific knowledge, skills, dispositions and accomplishments achieved over time.

The Process Involves 4 Steps

1. Select personal or professional goal.
2. Collect actual items and documents that could demonstrate what you are doing to reach your goal.
3. Decide which items best illustrate your achievement of or progress toward the goal.
4. Determine how to present the selected items.

Purpose/Benefit of the Professional Portfolio

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First, the portfolio process helps students to reframe how they see themselves as learners.

It encourages them to think about their learning, and the learning environment, in critical and meaningful ways – to become mindful, intentional, self-directed learners. For many learners, the portfolio process reignites their intellectual curiosity, the same quality we admire and seek to foster in children.

Second, the portfolio process provokes adult learners to look at education differently – as integrative and ongoing – reaching far beyond the confines of the classroom and continuing throughout life.

We have heard so often from students over the years that they have felt that their college classes were irrelevant and had no connection to “real life.” Many have experienced higher education as a series of hoops one jumps through to get the “piece of paper.” On the contrary, students who have experienced the portfolio process report a high degree of connectedness between what they do in the college classroom and what they experience beyond the classroom door. The real-world nature of portfolio work bridges the theory-to-practice gap in ways that result in meaningful learning and change. Course content ceases to be the stuff one crams for a test and soon forgets. It comes to be owned by the learner, and therefore it becomes part of the fabric of one’s professional life and development.

Difference Between Personal & Professional Portfolio