Heads up — this article is for the UX people who generally work in permanent roles.

Here’s a scenario…

You are thinking of leaving your current role, and decide to update your portfolio. This involves a series of steps.

1. Freaking out about how bad your old portfolio looks
2. Looking at other peoples’ portfolios online and having another melt down
3. Worrying about which platform you should be using
4. Realising that you’ve not got half of the content you need for your case studies
5. Trying to work out how to make a single portfolio relevant for every possible job

Sound familiar?

Let’s break this down.

1. Your portfolio looks old

Good. If you’ve been in a perm job for any length of time and done actual work, your portfolio should look old. Time has passed, your skills have improved and broadened and you know better what “good” looks like, so your case studies are out of date.

This is why it’s time to update it. Nothing to worry about here.

2. Being intimidated by other peoples’ portfolios

If they are publicly available, and coming up at the top of Google, then you’re probably looking at freelancers’ portfolios. These UXers spend most of their lives showing off their work in order to get the next gig. If you’re a permie, you don’t need to compete with that level of salesmanship. You just need one job, not all of them.

Freelancers have to constantly think about what everyone or anyone might want from them. You just need to think about what will be the best representation of you for the one job you want.

It’s great to aspire to having an amazing portfolio. But comparing yourself to a portfolio that contains deep experience if you’re a newbie, or polished UI if you’re a UXR/strat, is just like the standard social media pitfall — you’re comparing someone else’s polished, edited highlights to your daily reality. This way madness lies.

3. Panicking over the platform

Again, this doesn’t really matter. If it’s a website then it needs to work on a mobile. If you’re under NDA, it needs to have password protection. It looks better if you have your own URL, not a .something extension. And for g*ds sake use accessible colour contrasts because really it’s not hard.

That’s it.

A hiring manager looks at a portfolio for a few seconds (minutes they’re having a good day) and the one thing they don’t worry about is whether you’re hosting your portfolio on wordpress or a-n-other platform.

4. Missing case study content

Well I’m afraid this one is self-inflicted. We’ve all done it — but normally you only do this once in your career and then realise that you should be collecting and collating case study material on every project you work on. Here’s a handy guide that I wrote because I also once screwed myself on this one.

5. Trying to create a portfolio for every job application

You’re probably applying for a range of roles. But how can you write a portfolio to match every application? Well you can’t, obviously. What you need to do is identify the themes or types or roles you are after, and design for that.

Again, if you’re not a freelancer then you don’t have to have a portfolio that attracts every possible employer and every possible project for months or years to come just to maintain your pipeline of work — you just need a portfolio that shows the kind of job you want next, and shows that you can do the kind of work those roles need.

So as an example — If you’ve just finished in an agency, and are looking for an in-house role, then you want to write case studies that highlight client-side UX issues that you’ve worked on.

Admittedly, with a word.doc CV it’s super easy to create multiple versions tailored to each role you apply to. It’s much harder to create multiple portfolios or journeys online. With a portfolio therefore, it’s generally better to just stick to one answer which is what you are looking for.

The difficult bit is deciding what you want.

In another post, I will write about how to define and curate your portfolio content strategy, so stay tuned for that.

Are portfolios redundant for permanent UX roles?

Having read the above, you might be thinking “Why bother with a portfolio every few years just to get a job?”

Well, the industry still kind of expects them. Definitely for UI people, generally for UXDs and sometimes for UXRs and strats.

(Product Designers — we hiring managers just need a portfolio to work out which thing you are because no one is good at everything, sorry.)

However there is change afoot, with many hiring managers starting to question the trustworthiness of portfolios, just as homework-based design tasks have come under fire in recent years. You just have to see LinkedIn for these discussions if you don’t believe me.

Why is this? Well, portfolios are really easy to fake. They are marketing. The lived reality of a person’s actual experience and the way they show up for a job is often very very different. This makes the CV and the interview(s) a lot more important than that few seconds looking at a portfolio that maybe took you months to put together.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say, any hiring manager who refuses to interview an experienced candidate unless they see a full portfolio beforehand, really doesn’t know how to assess someone’s UX skills in an interview.

So what is a portfolio really good for?

If you are a permie UXer, here are two good reasons for creating and maintaining a portfolio and neither of them have anything to do with getting a job.

1. Training yourself

One of the most effective things in tracking your own professional development and learning is by reflecting on previous work you have done. How have you approached projects in different ways? What worked and what didn't? What deliverables have you found the most useful when communicating design work to clients? What has not worked what have you not done enough of and need to build your skills?

It is very easy over time to forget what you did in the past, to miss those learnings or to not realise your blind spots and inexperience — which you will need to know when you re-visit the job market to find your next role.

Maintaining a portfolio of case studies for yourself will aid you enormously in tracking your own professional development.

2. Training others

As you move from junior to senior, other UXers will come to you for advice and guidance. How will you explain concepts to them? What examples can you show them of “what a <deliverable> looks like” without having to Google other peoples’ generic work out-of-context?

If you have a well-organised portfolio — and the key here is it doesn’t have to be public — then you’ve essentially got a database of projects, methodologies and deliverables which helps you share your experience with others, and plan appropriate approaches to new design challenges.

It works if you work it

Maintaining a portfolio as a training and development tool helps you in your current permanent role because it helps you learn and grow and collaborate with others with a shared understanding. But also, simply by maintaining it and adding new case studies and content, you will have a library of work that can very quickly and easily be adapted to a job search, should you suddenly decide or find that a change is needed.

If you use an online portfolio, at short notice you can log in, show/hide case studies, make a couple of tweaks to your “about” area, and hey presto — you are ready to start applying. And if you’ve been using your own work as reference for training and development during your current role, then you’ll also have a very thorough innate knowledge of your own work which will shine through at interview.