Using Digital Showcase Portfolio to Demonstrate Achievements

Dr Xianhui Che, QMUL Westfield Fund Winning Project 2022

Background:

The concept of a showcase portfolio refers to a selective collection of a practitioner’s most accomplished work to date, which is often used by students, researchers, and professionals in the art and design field. It is also frequently used in degree shows, recruitment events, and showcase events at the school level – two recent examples from EECS can be seen below (created by the Principal Investigator for two modules):

• Showreel of 3D Graphics Programming Tools
• Showreel of Interactive Media Design and Production

This type of showreel is the most direct way to present students’ work to potential employers, for example, during job interviews. To date, individual students from all disciplines usually rely solely on pure text-based resumes to pitch their skills. They largely do not have the knowledge and skills to create a powerful and appealing digital asset (such as the showreel in the example above) to pitch their achievements to potential employers.

Under the pervasive digital economy, there is a growing demand for greater visibility of students' and graduates’ employability. Students should be able to visualise their achievements using a more digital media approach. Showcase portfolios will become a valuable asset and powerful language to demonstrate a student’s knowledge, skillsets, and achievements, making them stand out amongst potential candidates in competitive industries and the employment market.

Addressing the Gap:

There has been relatively little work to date in the area of directly promoting students and graduates’ visibility and dynamically publicising their achievements in the job market. Currently, there is a gap in academic institutions where little or no guidance exists for students to prepare digital showcase portfolios. While most if not all universities have a careers centre to assist students in creating CVs, precious few help students promote themselves via digital showcase portfolios. This project aims to address this gap.

Proposed Solutions:

The proposed solution is to establish a permanent online resource centre where materials and guidance are provided for students to create digital showcase portfolios that demonstrate their skills and achievements to industry and potential employers.

The resources aim to help students produce various types of portfolios depending on their needs, which they can keep for themselves for future job applications, interviews, or other competitive events. The different types of portfolios include:

• Showreels: a few minutes of the edited video presenting visual work; usually a mixture of animation, filmmaking, screen capturing, etc.
• Demo of artefacts: video capturing of hardware and software; highlighting key outcomes, milestones, testing results, etc.
• Multimedia CVs: rich format CVs with built-in images, audio, and even videos; could be web-based, Word, or PDF.
• Digital media presence: personal web, LinkedIn, social networks, etc.

The online resource centre will run as an ongoing workshop on QMPlus or QMHub, which will be accessible to all students in the University.

The range of resources provided to students will include:

• Guidance on gaining awareness of the digital presence and online visibility, as well as understanding the requirements and usage of different types of portfolios.
• Standard templates for different types of showcase portfolios and for different types of disciplines/majors.
• Tutorials that offer a step-by-step guide on creating different types of portfolios.
• Instructions on using specific software and hardware to create and edit video portfolios.
• Example portfolios will be given for common majors.

Digital Portfolio Resource Centre and Competition Launch!

Digital Portfolio Launch