Start Here

For anybody starting out, or starting again.

Ignore: a follower count. A personal brand before you have a body of work to brand. Certificates that certify attendance. Learning a fifth tool when you cannot yet do anything finished with the first. Advice from people whose only visible output is advice.

Build: three finished things. Finished is the operative word - a small complete piece beats an ambitious unfinished one every time, because completion is itself the rare signal.

One of the three should be for a real person with a real problem, even unpaid, even small. It changes the work in ways you cannot fake, and it gives you the only sentence that matters in an interview: here is what happened when somebody actually used it.

Ninety days is enough for three small finished things. It is not enough for a portfolio of grand ones, and attempting the second is how most people end the ninety days with nothing.

If you are at that stage: what would the first of the three be?

A CV is a claim. A portfolio is evidence. That is the whole difference and it is bigger than it sounds.

Everything on a CV is a sentence about yourself, written by you, that the reader has to take on trust. Eleven years. Led a team. Grew the account. All of it might be true and none of it can be checked in the ninety seconds your reader is giving you.

A portfolio removes the trust step. Here is the thing. Look at it.

The objection I hear is "my work is not visual" or "it is all confidential". Fair. But a portfolio does not have to be pictures of work. It can be a page explaining a decision you made and why you made it instead of the obvious alternative. A teardown of somebody else's work, done well. A short write-up of a problem in your industry that most people get wrong.

None of that needs your employer's permission. All of it proves judgement, which is becoming hard to demonstrate and therefore worth demonstrating.

What is one piece of evidence you could put together this week that needs nobody's approval?