If you're a serious professional, and it's safe to assume that you are, you cannot make your portfolio just once and be done with it. It will always be a continuously evolving process that needs thought, consideration, and creativity.
Hence, the need for a portfolio that exhibits your career achievements over a period of time.
Without further ado, let's look at some of the top career portfolio examples around to inspire you to create yours.
• In 2023 and beyond, a simple resume just does not cut it for most professionals. Sure, you need to have one. But the thing that recruiters truly use to gauge your employability is your professional career portfolio.
• In particular, certain recruiters might request a portfolio in the PDF format. This is often because, unlike other formats, PDF files don't scramble or distort content. For example, it is normal for a Word doc sent from a Windows device to be unopenable on a Mac. With a PDF, this is not a problem.
• However, despite containing PDFs, your portfolio still needs to be presentable, sleek, and industry-best. It still needs to contain all or most of your work (ideally in PDF format, if that's what the client wants). It cannot just be a 3-4 sheeter PDF file (though, that works sometimes...just not often).
• To get a sense of what such a career portfolio looks like, study the 15 career portfolios laid out in this article. All of them are professionals at the top of their field. They have formidable skills, significant work experience, and their clients' or employers' confidence.
• Their portfolios also look great, are organized for easy navigation, and represent plenty of work samples so that employers can get a real, in-depth understanding of how they work.
• Once you understand the principles of a great career portfolio, you need a tool to create one. Now, you'll have to choose a tool that makes sense for your needs. If your priority is to create unique visual aesthetics and showcase your design skills, something like Squarespace or Carbonmade is ideal. But if you want to create a self-updating portfolio with very little work, then may we suggest Authory?
• Authory is a portfolio-building tool that does most of the work. Enter the URL of your published, bylined pieces (say, the URL of a blog where your work is published), and Authory will find, import, and permanently save all of your work.
• You can use Authory to import, save, and showcase articles, videos, podcasts, web copy, email copy, and social media posts. You can even use it to find and showcase content in which you were featured. Finally, Authory actually helps you prove that you have NEVER used AI to create written content.
What types of professionals need portfolios?
For most professionals, it's great if you can showcase your work either through a professional portfolio or via case studies.
That said, artists, musicians, designers, writers, journalists, marketers (especially content marketers and social media marketers), video creators, and thought leaders, generally content creators of all kinds, will benefit from making a portfolio.
In other cases, a résumé (alternatively spelled "resume") could suffice, though a LinkedIn profile can be helpful in such situations.
Ten professional career portfolio examples (PDF)
These portfolio examples have been picked with the following criteria in mind:
- These active professionals are at the top of their fields, with super impressive skills and qualifications
- They all have significant work experience and will serve as references for what a complete career portfolio looks like
- All of them have great-looking, well-organized professional portfolios that prove that a long career can still be concisely showcased
- The PDF format is well-presented in their work samples (something that can be hard to do usually)
Hopefully, looking at these portfolio examples will help you create your own professional portfolio that is attractive to a future employer.
Career portfolio example 1: Carter Hammett
Carter Hammett is a social worker, writer, author, and trainer. He's written three books and is also the manager of employment services with Epilepsy Toronto, which supports the job search needs of people living with epilepsy and related disabilities.
Here's Carter's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 2: Susan Horsburgh
Susan Horsburgh is a journalist and writer with more than 25 years of experience writing news, features, and cover stories for leading international and Australian publications, including TIME, People, The Weekend Australian Magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly, Good Weekend, The Age (Melbourne) Magazine, The Australian Financial Review Magazine, and The Australian newspaper.
Here's Susan's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 3: Fabrizio Tonello
Fabrizio Tonello is a Professor of political science at the University of Padua.
Here's Fabrizio's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 4: Alex Hargrave
Alex Hargrave is a reporting fellow at E&E News.
Here's Alex's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 5: Kevin Johnston
Kevin Johnston has written for The New York Daily News, The Houston Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, Prudential, The NASDAQ, Standard & Poor's, and hundreds of online outlets.
Here's Kevin's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 6: Jan Servaes
Jan Servaes (Ph.D.) was UNESCO Chair in Communication for Sustainable Social Change. He has taught International Communication and Communication for Social Change in Australia, Belgium, China, Hong Kong, the United States, the Netherlands, and Thailand, in addition to several teaching and research stints at about 120 universities in 55 countries.
Here's Jan's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 7: Randy Caparoso
Randy Caparoso is a full-time wine journalist/photographer living in Lodi, California. He is the author of "Lodi! The Definitive Guide and History of America's Largest Winegrowing Region."
Here's Randy's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 8: Christine Steele
Christine Steele is an award-winning journalist and content creator skilled in creating authentic SEO content that exceeds metrics and drives brand engagement.
Here's Christine's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 9: Howard M Cohen
Howard M. Cohen is a 35+ year executive veteran of the Information Technology industry, an authorized CompTIA instructor, and a regular contributor to many IT industry publications.
Here's Howard's career portfolio (PDFs).
Career portfolio example 10: Sundararaman T
Dr. Sundararaman is an award-winning Health Systems & Health Policy veteran, having been associated for over four decades across the best academic institutes in India, such as JNU, IIT Bombay, TISS, and JIPMER, to name a few. He has written over fifty books, mainly on health issues, in both popular communication and public health texts. He has also written several articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Here's Sundarararaman's career portfolio (PDFs).
Five creative portfolio examples
The following list of portfolio examples has been prepared with these aspects in mind:
- These folks are highly creative professionals of note, ranging from business to sport
- The portfolios highlight non-PDF format examples
- Their professional portfolio examples are easy on the eye
- They don't just post writing content
Seeing this list of professional portfolios will give candidates an idea of how to impress prospective employers.
Creative portfolio example 1: David Pogue
David Pogue is a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS, and creator/host of the CBS News/Simon & Schuster podcast Unsung Science. He's also written or co-written over 120 books!
Here's David's creative career portfolio.
Creative portfolio example 2: Steven Levy
Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” He has written the definitive books on Facebook, Google, the Macintosh, and the iPod. For almost four decades, he has chronicled the digital revolution, its impact on humanity, and the people behind it.
Here's Steven's creative career portfolio.
Creative portfolio example 3: Jarrod Kimber
Jarrod Kimber is a cricket commentator, analyst, presenter, YouTuber, and podcaster. He spent a decade with ESPN, with freelance gigs with places like Sports Illustrated, the Ringer, ABC, The Telegraph, BBC, and The Blizzard, and hosted various shows with Andy Zaltzman. He was also a General Manager of a T20 cricket franchise and has been a team analyst for many cricket teams.
Here's Jarrod's creative career portfolio.
Creative portfolio example 4: Carolyn Hinds
Carolyn Hinds is a film culture critic, journalist, podcaster, and YouTuber whose published work can be found on multiple online publications like ButWhyThoPodcast.com, Shondaland, Observer, Mediaversity Reviews, and many others.
Here's Carolyn's creative career portfolio.
Creative portfolio example 5: Jorden Makelle
Jorden Makelle is a writer, musician, and YouTuber talking about freelance writing, creative writing, entrepreneurship, books & reading, and creativity & self-development.
Here's Jorden's creative career portfolio.
Authory — an auto-updating portfolio builder for your career portfolio
When you create a career portfolio, you WILL need to maintain the content on it and keep it up-to-date. Authory is a brilliant portfolio builder because it auto-updates! Hence, it's super easy to maintain.
Setting up Authory is really simple — it takes just 3 minutes — just add your sources and/or byline, and Authory will scour the internet, find all your content, and add it to your account.
Authory is also really easy on the eye. Take a look at my portfolio below:
Read More: How to Create a PDF Portfolio With Very Little Time & Effort
Authory also backs up all your work. Even if the original article goes down or is re-bylined, Authory will have a copy of the piece in its original format — no other portfolio builder does this, AFAIK.
Along with all this, Authory gives you social media analytics for all your content (without you needing to connect your social media account to Authory), and it's great if you're looking to set up a newsletter.
In a word, Authory is fantastic. Especially for writers, journalists, marketers, content creators, and thought leaders.
As a result, it's used by the best. Here's David Pogue on Authory:
Just a reminder: If you’d like to get email notifications with links to new Pogue TV stories, articles, and podcast episodes, visit https://t.co/ClOUcpSGZT. This has been a public-service message.
— David Pogue (@Pogue) January 11, 2023
Also, David speaks glowingly about Authory in this video on "This Week in Tech."
And finally, did I mention that Authory is superb for PDFs? Most portfolio builders genuinely struggle with PDFs. Here's my PDF portfolio as proof:
How Authory can help you build your career portfolio — PDF or otherwise
Authory does the heavy lifting of your portfolio-building process — finding your work samples. you don’t have to run around (digitally) and find individual links for your published work. Just enter the URLs of the websites where they are published, and Authory will do the rest.
You can even create private Collections to showcase work under an NDA or work that is ghostwritten. Such Collections remain secret to everyone on the public internet. You, their creator, are the only one who can choose to send them to specific people by sharing their unique URLs.
You can also use Authory to definitively prove that you do not use AI to write. I don’t have to tell you why that is a valuable functionality for professional writers in this suddenly AI-everywhere world.
Finally, you can check out everything Authory offers….for free. Simply sign up for a 14-day free trial, put together your professional portfolio, and let us know if it helps you!
