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.

Portfolios.lincoln

An e-portfolio is a collection of information and digital objects that demonstrate your learning development, skills and competencies. Like you, your ePortfolio is unique and reflects your interests based around the structure of your learning and development at the University of Lincoln. By keeping your portfolio up to date you can easily find work you’ve done in the past, keep track of your aims while at university and beyond, and of course, use the data to build a CV which will help you applying for jobs.

Students and staff can now create their own e-portfolio by visiting http://portfolios.lincoln.ac.uk. (Thanks to Joss Winn for making the domain available)

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series of entries here showing you how to set up your portfolio, how to make different views available to different users (for example, you might want different employers to see different versions of your CV), and how to export the data so you can take it with you when you leave.

For now, why not click on the link above and explore. You don’t need to register, because you can log in with your usual university username and password.

Portfolios.lincoln uses the open source Mahara portfolio tool which is still very much in development. We’re currently using the latest stable version (Mahara 1.1), but will evaluate new versions as they become available and upgrade when stable versions are published.