Portfolios.lincoln: Views 2. Building your CV

I described the process of laying out your view in my previous post. This, though is where it gets interesting. Portfolios.lincoln uses what are known as “blocks” to populate your views. Each block represents one or more artefacts in your portfolio and shows that artefact in the view. In this post, I’m going to look at the blocks you need to set up a simple CV.

Assuming you’re logged in, click “My Portfolio” and then “My views”. Then click the “Create view” button.

You’ll see the tabbed “blocks” menu across the top of the screen

The tabbed blocks menu
The tabbed blocks menu

You decide what you want to appear in this view of your portfolio by dragging the relevant block to the appropriate position in your layout.

In most views, you’ll want to include some information about yourself, so start by clicking the “profile” tab. This has five blocks, and we’ll look at them one by one.

Contact information

The add your contact details block.
The add your contact details block.
When you drag this to the layout area, you will be given a range of actions, asking you which bits of your contact information you wish to share. Simply tick the boxes that you want to include.

Profile information

The profile information block
The profile information block
When you drag this block into your layout area you’ll be asked which bits of your profile you want to show, which, if any of your profile pictures you want to show, and given the opportunity to write a short introduction about yourself.


Friends, Groups and Views.

[nggallery id=maharablox]

These three icons all work in exactly the same way. If you have added any friends, joined any groups, or created multiple views you can drag the relevant icon to your chosen layout column, and they will display a gallery of your friends, or a list of your groups and views.

Resume

You can either include your entire CV in a single block or you can control how it is displayed by a view by selecting which fields you want to display, and in which order.

Entire Resumé Block
Entire Resumé Block
If you simply want to create a view that shows your CV (or resumé) and nothing else, then you might consider creating a view with one column, and just dragging this block into it. You can choose what title you give it, but otherwise there is no control over how your resume is displayed. (You can of course add other columns and blocks.)

If you want a slightly more sophisticated view, you can add single fields from your CV (e.g. Contact or Personal Information, employment history, education history, books and publications, personal academic or work skills) by dragging the

Single field block
Single field block
single field block into the view. You can do this as many times as you like for each of your resumé fields. Once you’ve added it to the view, you can change the name of each field. For example, you could change “Education History” to “Qualifications” if you felt it was more relevant. The advantage is that you can control exactly how readers see your CV, and allows you to combine different parts of your CV with evidence of the claims that you are making. Unlike a traditional CV, Portfolios.lincoln allows you to show off examples of the work you have done. The next post will look at how to integrate files, blogs, and multimedia into your view.

Portfolios.lincoln: Creating your resume

Your resumé, or curriculum vitae (CV) is an important part of your portfolio for two reasons. First, of course, is that it is the basis of any applications you might make for jobs. The second reason though, is that individual sections (or fields) from your resumé can be used to construct different views of your portfolio.

For now though, here’s how to add a resume to portfolios.lincoln.

Go into the profile section of your portfolio and click My Resumé

You will see that there are 9 sections (or fields). Most of these are simple on-line forms but some are a little bit more sophisticated.

Cover letter
Traditionally a cover letter is the place where you include information that you can’t fit into a resumé. If you’re applying for a job, you might use it to explain why you’re particularly suitable for a job. In this case you might think of it as a personal statement, outlining what you can bring to an organisation, and describing what evidence you have to support the claims they are making.

In portfolios.lincoln this is a simple text box, which is supported by a range of word processing tools that allow you to make typographical changes, insert pictures and so on,
You don’t have to complete it all at once, but when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Interests

As the title suggests, this is where you can write a detailed description of your personal interests. Technically, this field is identical to the Cover Letter field above. It is a simple text box, which is supported by a range of word processing tools that allow you to make typographical changes, insert pictures and so on,
You don’t have to complete it all at once, but when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Contact information

This is taken from the information you saved when you set up your profile. If you’re not sure how to do that, please have a look at the instructions for setting up your profile.
As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Personal Information

This is a relatively simple on line form, which just asks for your date of birth, place of birth, citizenship, visa status, gender and marital status. While this may seem personal information, none of this will be visible to anyone else unless you choose to make it available in a view

As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Employment History

emp_hist

This section of the form is a little bit more flexible. To get started click the Add button as illustrated above. This will open the form illustrated here.

Employment history form
Employment history form

The fields highlighted in orange MUST be completed. That is to say, you must give a job title, the name of the employer and the date on which you started. You can also give an end date, and write a brief description of the job. If you do write this description, then the job title will be hyperlinked and users who click on the job title will be able to read your description. (Always of course, provided you’ve made it available to them in a view.

As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Education History

The Education history form is similar to the employment history form, except that it allows you to detail your qualifications and this time the compulsory fields are the start date, (the date you did the course) the Institution name, Qualification Type and Qualification name.

Education history form
Education history form

Qualification type refers to the type of qualification you did, and name refers to the way you usually describe it. So for example “A level” would be a qualification name and “GCE” would be a qualification type.

Where you have multiple qualifications (e.g. 4 A levels) and you want to list these and the grades you recieved you can do this in the description box (e.g. Biology (A) Chemistry (A*), Physics (A) and Mathematics (B)

As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.
Certifications, Accreditations and Awards

This is a very simple field which only requires you to add the name of any additional certifications or awards that you might have recieved, along with the date that you recieved them. You can add a description if you wish, perhaps including information about why you applied for this particular award, or what you learned from it.

Books and publications

Another simple field in which you can describe the date, title and contribution you made to any published work. As usual there is a field for further descriptions.

As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.

Professional Memberships

Lastly you can list any professional associations that you are a member of, and list details of any charterships or other professional status. The only compulsory fields are the start date and a Title. (This is fairly flexible and could be either the name of the association or your professional title.)

As usual when you’ve finished working on it, click the “Save” button.