“Ask yourself where you can add value”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question: 

“How do you rebuild a portfolio when you don’t believe in your own work?

I’m a 32 year old graphic designer working in an in-house marketing team, and I’m ready for a change, but my portfolio is holding me back. It hasn’t been updated in years, and I honestly don’t believe much of my recent work is strong or exciting enough to showcase. As a new Dad, with limited time and energy after work, the usual advice of building personal projects on the side feels unrealistic.

How do you approach updating a portfolio in this situation? Is it possible to build something compelling from everyday in-house work and how do you find the motivation to invest in your own career when you’re tired?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

I’m sure your recent work has a rightful place in your book – but you do need to sell it. If you don’t believe in the work you’re presenting, you’ll have a hard time making someone else believe in it. Which is not going to open any doors for you. The truth is, in-house projects have unbelievable value. You just need to position them slightly differently to agency ones.

Start by highlighting the problem you solved. Be clear about the constraints, and the key challenge of the project. Include the nitty gritty – budgets, deadlines, audiences. Build the context around the brief. Then show how you solved it. The great news is you have access to something that most don’t – real metrics. Real impact measured as a result of your creativity. Shout about it, it’s impressive in interviews.

As for your older work, any project can be elevated with a few simple tweaks.

1. Revisit how you’re telling the story. Make sure your projects aren’t in your portfolio apologetically. Give it the space it deserves. Rewrite the intro with fresh eyes.
2. Level up the visuals. It’s amazing what a decent mockup can do. Sites like Bendito or Supply Family have great mockups to enhance any project, so invest in a couple. There’s nothing more off putting than seeing an iPhone 4 in a portfolio. Make sure it feels up to date.
3. Ask yourself where you can add value. Is there a campaign idea you can tag on to an old project, or somewhere you can inject some motion? Look for the low time investment, high impact tasks you can tackle for each project.

The aim should be to make each project in your portfolio 20 per cent better. But that doesn’t have to happen all at once. It could be 15 minutes of your lunch break, or starting an hour earlier on Wednesdays. By breaking down what you want to upgrade into smaller tasks, that means when you have a spare moment (which I know are few and far between as a new Dad) you won’t waste any time wondering what to do.

And most importantly, give yourself some grace. Tackling your portfolio is one of the hardest tasks for any creative. So any time or energy you can dedicate to it will help. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t forget, careers aren’t linear. You might jump into your dream role with your current portfolio, so think about this next step as a chance to improve your book for the one afterwards. You’ve got this.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

If You Could is the jobs board from It’s Nice That, the place to find jobs in the creative industries.

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