| name | prepare-a-portfolio-review |
| category | get-hired |
| description | Prepare a role-specific portfolio presentation that selects credible work, explains decisions and contribution, handles confidentiality, and rehearses discussion under time limits. Use when someone has a design, engineering, data, writing, product, or creative portfolio interview or review. |
prepare-a-portfolio-review
Choose evidence for the role and practice the conversation around it. The portfolio should make ownership,
judgment, results, collaboration, and learning clear without exposing confidential work.
Inputs
- Gather the job description, company brief, review format, time limit, audience, and allowed presentation tools.
- Inventory case studies, live work, repositories, artifacts, feedback, metrics, and confidentiality rules.
- Ask which work the person can explain deeply and honestly.
Procedure
- Extract the role's likely evaluation criteria and rank them by evidence needed.
- Build a project matrix matching each candidate piece to relevant skills, contribution, decisions, proof, and risks.
- Select the smallest set that covers the criteria without repeating the same story.
- Create a narrative for each: context, goal, role, constraints, key decisions, collaboration, result, limitation, and lesson.
- Make personal contribution explicit and distinguish team, inherited, and guided work.
- Replace confidential screens or data with approved redactions, recreations, diagrams, or verbal explanation.
- Choose artifacts that support claims: before and after, code, model, data, feedback, release, or measured outcome.
- Build a timed opening, project transitions, deep-dive path, and concise close.
- Prepare answers about trade-offs, failures, disagreement, quality, impact, and what changed after feedback.
- Run a recorded mock with a reviewer who has not seen the work. Score clarity, relevance, evidence, timing, and question handling.
- Revise and test links, files, fonts, media, network assumptions, and a backup presentation.
Boundaries
Never invent ownership, metrics, users, clients, or outcomes. Do not reveal private employer, customer,
student, patient, source-code, or research material without permission. Do not let visual polish hide missing evidence.
Done
- A project-selection matrix connects every chosen piece to role criteria and verified evidence
- The timed presentation clearly distinguishes personal, team, inherited, and confidential contributions
- A recorded mock produces scored feedback and a revised narrative
- All links, files, media, redactions, timing, and backup presentation are verified
Then use write-a-case-study to strengthen a weak project narrative or prepare-a-technical-interview for other stages.
