The document discusses using career portfolios to document community service experience and transferable skills. It describes the basic components of a career portfolio, including a professional bio, resume, work samples, references, and documentation of community service, degrees and awards. Employers are increasingly interested in soft skills gained through community service, such as leadership, customer service, and problem solving. The document provides suggestions for requesting documentation from community service organizations to include in a portfolio as evidence of skills and competencies. It also discusses using apps and social media to track community service hours and increase impact.

1. Using Career Portfolios to
Make Community Service
Count
Anna Graf Williams, PhD
Senior Partner, Learnovation®, LLC
Emily Sellers
AmeriCorps Director, Indiana Campus
Compact

2. Objectives
• Describe the basic components of a
career portfolio.
• Identify the benefits of community
service as they affect transferable
skills in their fields of work.
• Identify how service organizations
can better document volunteerism,
through the use of photos, letters,
awards, certificates, and
documentation.

3. The Community Service
Thing…
• Besides the “feel good”
• Industry is looking for will you…
– Grow leadership around you
– Save us money
– Make us money
– Delivery quality customer/guest service
– Can you service the mission?
• Service Highlights
– Skills
– Trainings
– Certifications
Prove it!!!

4. What is included in a
Career Portfolio?
• Management
• Community Service
Philosophy
(Transferable Skills)
• Professional Bio
• Professional Memberships
• Professional Goals
• Degrees, Certifications &
• Résumé Awards
• Work Samples by key – Plan of Study
areas • Reference Info
• Works in Progress

5. Requesting Documentation
for a Work Sample
• Competencies
– Skills, abilities, knowledge—tools and
technologies
• Soft Skills
• Leadership
• Personal Experience--Individual,
group, cooperative work
• Tasks
• Length of time, dates—who worked
with…

6. • Skills — Resource Management Skills
• Developed capacities used to allocate resources efficiently
• Management of Financial Resources — Determining how
money will be spent to get the work done, and accounting
3rd Party Documentation Topic for these expenditures.
Soft Skill Proof of: • Management of Material Resources — Obtaining and
seeing to the appropriate use of equipment, facilities, and
Coordination — Adjusting actions materials needed to do certain work.
in relation to others' actions.
• Management of Personnel Resources — Motivating,
Instructing — Teaching others developing, and directing people as they work, identifying
how to do something. the best people for the job.
Negotiation — Bringing others • Time Management — Managing one's own time and the
together and trying to reconcile time of others.
differences.
• Skills — Systems Skills
Persuasion — Persuading others
to change their minds or behavior. • Developed capacities used to understand, monitor, and
improve socio-technical systems
Service Orientation — Actively
looking for ways to help people. • Judgment and Decision Making — Considering the
relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose
Social Perceptiveness— Being the most appropriate one.
aware of others' reactions and
understanding why they react as • Systems Analysis — Determining how a system should
they do. work and how changes in conditions, operations, and the
environment will affect outcomes.
• Systems Evaluation — Identifying measures or indicators
of system performance and the actions needed to
improve or correct performance, relative to the goals of
the system.

7. Social Networking your
Community Service
Pro Con
• Using an app with a • HIPA volunteer
clock to document requirements in jeopardy
times worked • Your service may be private
• Increasing the impact such as accounting, working
of your work with private information
• “Retweets” on your
community service
and programs—stats
to document

8. •Monitor Cloud in Action
•Keyboard
•Mouse
Bluetooth
•Power Printer
Laptop Web TV
Your
Career Tools
IPAD
USB Drive
Smart Phone
External Hard Drive Gaming Systems

9. There’s an app for that…
• Choosing Apps…
– How secure is the data?
– Is it your data? Is it your data only?
– How reliable and trust worthy is the company?
Will they be here a year from now? Longer…
– What is the source output of your data? Word
file, excel, pdf, jpeg, comma delimited or a
proprietary format?
• Cost Value Analysis…
– If your laptop was run over by an 18 wheeler
today can you replace the data?
– What is your time worth?
• Time of access from anywhere…them backing
up…you backing up

10. Professional Plan
Community
Training/ Technology
Key Skill Area Key Skill Service/
Leadership Research
Educator
Patient State of the Groups
Cost control Lab Analysis
Plans Art
Field Customer Projects
Production Development
Web
Information
Professional New Talents
Software Classes
Communica knowledge
designed
tion to the field
Transferable
Prof Skills
SPV Staff Ulta Media Apps Professionally
Software

11. Using the Career Portfolio to
Pull it all Together!
• Career Portfolios are used to:
– Get a job
• Negotiate soft benefits
• Increase starting pay
– Get a promotion
– Earn academic life credit
–The professional competency
snapshot of you!

12. Take it Back
• Questions
• Ideas
• Call to Action!
anna@learnovation.com
Or
sellerse@iupui.edu