How to be the Perfect Candidate…Hints and tips on creating your portfolio of a career in a Digital Marketing Agency

Whilst on my travels, visiting employers in Digital Marketing agencies, and discussing the skills they are looking for in students and graduates looking to enter the sector, an observation has been that students and graduates are emailing in CV’s and Covering Letters asking for employment and/or work experience, but they aren’t including any examples of their work.  Employers ask how can we judge the quality of their work when we can’t see any examples of it.  It’s all well and good knowing that the student has a 2:1 in Web Development from Manchester Metropolitan University but what did they actually do during their degree, where does their passion lie, what’s their style? etc  Web designers need to have a website to show, backend developers need examples of coding for complex websites etc.

Therefore I thought I would put together this blog on the thoughts and observations from the employers and recruitment consultants I have spoken with operating in the sector.  What are they after and how can you meet their needs?

How to present your portfolio

This section will give you some ideas on how to present your portfolio.  There is no one set way to go about this.  Instead here are some ideas of what you could do and the pro’s and con’s of different approaches.  What works for you?  What suits your personality and style?

1.  CV

Write your CV and at the very least include some urls of work you have done.  Make sure they work!  Check regularly to make sure the sites are still live and that they work across browsers.  It’s not an impressive start if the employer clicks on the first url and it doesn’t work.  Underneath the url you could also include a short description of what you actually did on the website.  Are you the creative genius who has made the site look so appealing, or are you the techie who has written the complex code?

2.  CV (but more fancy!)

As above, but this time include a screen shot of websites you have worked on, with hyperlinks taking the employer through to the site.  It’s a good idea to have developed your own website or blog, this way you can make sure it is still working, and includes your work.

3.  Portfolio

The traditional paper based portfolio can’t obviously be sent out in all job applications but it is a good idea for interviews.  This approach has advantages as it is not relying on technology working, or even the employer having a computer in the interview room.  It also overcomes the problem that the client may have changed the website since you did your contribution.  Employers spoke of students clicking on links within an interview and then saying the site which loaded isn’t theirs.  Printing out screen shots of your work prevents this from happening.

Include 3 or 4 examples of work from University, as well as briefs from work placements.  If you didn’t do a work placement then contact digital agencies and ask them if they will send you an old brief.  Sites such as dandad.org often have briefs on them for competitions.  Employers are looking for variety in your work examples, both in terms of the types of briefs, but also what you did on them.  Can you include examples of interactive, banners, email shots, viral as well as web.

Employers like to get an insight into your thought process and how you generate ideas.  It helps them see the example of your work in context.  Something as simple as an A5 notebook with your ideas jotted down in, that you can then talk through and show how you got to the end product can be useful, to compliment your online work. 

How to promote your portfolio to an employer

Think about what the employer is looking for when they are going though your portfolio.  They want to know what your involvement was in each project, the quality of your work and how it can help their business.  You need to target your portfolio, in the same way a Careers and Employability Adviser would advise you to target your CV.  What type of clients does the agency you can applying do mainly deal with?  Have you got an relevant examples from these sectors?  You need to show that you have the skills to do the job you are applying for.

Your Interests

Students often ask me whether they should include their personal interests and whether employers are interested.  Employers tell me they are.  The idea though is that your interests confirm your passion and love of all things digital, rather than the fact you like to read and socialise with your friends, oh and maybe occasionally go and see the latest hollywood blockbuster.  The interests you should be including are the fact that you attend networking events, such as Geek Up and Northern Digital, and demonstrate your people skills.  Orchard.co.uk have a handy events listing on their site.

Also can you find out anything about the employers interests such as through Linked In or meeting them at networking events?  If you have similar interests use this as a hook.  But don’t make it up, you’ll get caught out!

Hints

Be Creative!

You are applying for a job in a creative industry, so be creative!  A digital and PR agency told me that they would interview a student who had sent in an application in an imaginative way, so example in creative packaging.  Students who employers talk about after Pro Dev are those who had work to show and did something a bit different.  For example one girl brought an egg box and had her details on plastic eggs for employers to take away!

Keep it simple

Whilst you want the portfolio to look impressive and contain high quality work, it is also important to keep it simple.  The employer may well literally be looking at hundreds of portfolio’s.  On average a recruiter looks at a CV for 30 seconds.  It’s probably not a great deal more for a portfolio.  You need to portfolio to be clear, logical and interesting, and to contain a few targetted pieces of work. 

Get the basics right

Here in Careers, we frequently get complaints from employers about students and graduates making spelling and grammatical errors.  You can’t just rely on spell check, think of the example of a student saying that their past experience has involved `correcting erors’ and the graduate looking for a `career in bonking’!  Employers regularly tell us that spelling mistakes will be a reason to reject an application, however fantastic the rest of your work.  It shows a lack of attention to detail, as well as poor spelling.

Further support

For information about the other skills employers look for from graduates entering a career in a digital marketing agency, look at the Perfect Candidate website (www.theperfectcandidate.co.uk)

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Understanding the Competencies

David developed a data collection tool for acquiring information from the  key informant companies, which I am continuing to use with firms. The tool was designed to collect a lot of information about job descriptions and competences required for people to be able to do the work required in job descriptions.

So what does it mean?!

Cognitive competence – This involves intellectual abilities, from the most basic “knowing” of facts to the more sophisticated intellectual abilities of coming up with (synthesizing) new knowledge and evaluating existing knowledge.  The cognitive levels are knowledge (level 1), comprehension (level 2), application (level 3), analysis (level 4), synthesis (level 5) and evaluation (level 6).

Behavioural competence – Involves skills that involve some kind of manual dexterity, from the most basic “guided response” of an action (imitation or following an instruction) to the more sophisticated psychomotor skills of origination (creative proficiency).  The behavioural levels start with guided response (level 1), followed by mechanism (level 2), complex overt response (level 3), adaptation (level 4) and origination (level 5).

Affective competence – These  competencies affect people’s attitudes and values, from the most basic “Receiving phenomena” of an attitude or value (open to experience, willing to hear) to the more sophisticated values of “Internalising values” (adopt belief system and philosophy).   The affective levels start with receiving phenomena (level 1) , followed by responding to phenomena (level 2), valuing (level 3), organisation (level 4)and internalising values (level 5).

We are also interested in how essential a competence is to an employer.  This ranges from the most necessary – Need to Learn (N2L), follwed by Good to Learn (G2L) and then Nice to Know (N2K).

If you have any questions about this please get in touch.

SRC Data Collection

I’ve been working to get a data collection tool for acquiring information from my key informant companies. The tool will collect a lot of information about job descriptions and competences required for people to be able to do the work required in job descriptions.

I looked at a lot of approaches to collecting the data – databases, spreadsheets and so on. The danger was becoming obsessed with the technology approach to data collection. Office 2007 has all sorts of new tools on it, but actually building an electronic form with a complex series of if-then-else statements on it was more time consuming than actually simply writing words down on a form in Word.

So I’ve created a simple form that will allows me to gather data by quick transcription similar to forms I used when I collected outcome and objectives data at Academee. I am also creating a briefing document to be used with my informants to guide them on the language of learning (different to the language of “doing the job”) and how we’ll collect the data. The third document is a rewrite of the paper I wrote 9 years ago on Bloom’s 3 domains of learning, which is the basis of our competence collection tool.

The next job is to get a date when all firms can come and join us to try and understand the approach to data collection.

ProDev Day 2008

Our 2nd ProDev Day took place last Wednesday at MMU, and this seemed to be another great success. Feedback from the event from both students and employers has been fantastic and it looks like it should be the sort of thing that should be a permanent feature on the calendar.

More than 500 students came ot the event with 50 Digital professionals talking and sharing their passion for their careers and roles in their organisations.

Supporting Responsive Curricula: Start-up Meeting

Robin Johnson (Project Manager for the SRC project across the University), Nicola Whitton (Evaluation Team for SRC across the University) and I attended the Start-up Event at Eynsham Hall in Oxford on Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th October. Aside from learning about how our programme fits in, it also gave us a chance to look at some of the other projects that won bids from JISC.

Of particular importance was how closely some projects from other Northern Universities fitted with ours, and so we agreed to create a kind of Northern Consortium of project workers. This puts us in touch with teams of workers at Staffordshire, Leeds Metropolitan and Bolton. The common themes for our project lay around our students having common backgrounds and the cities having similar challenges.