These days, its not enough to just have an impressive paper resume. You also have to have an online portfolio. Something that, until today, I had not even thought of.
To be honest, until this semester I had never really given much thought to my online presence. Sure, I have a Facebook that I post to…occasionally. I also had every intention of building my own YouTube channel to showcase my work. Unfortunately, all these good intentions never really amounted to anything. But as I prepare to enter the professional world of broadcast journalism, it is time for me to get serious about multimedia and use it to find a job and succeed in the industry.
In that spirit, I learned how to build my own website using the web editor Weeebly. According to my professor and the College of Communications IT guru, Weebly is practically idiot proof. Anyone, they said, could build a website using Weebly. Well, clearly they didn’t know me as well as they thought. I have a terrible track record with technology. The thought of building my own website, no matter how easy, scared me. I want my website to look professional and showcase my skills well. My fear was that not being trained in website design, my website would one, turn out looking like a hot mess and two, look like every other website managed by a high school student.
After playing with Weebly for about an hour, I finally had a template selected and was starting to personalize my site. But then came the even bigger question, what do I put on a portfolio website and how do I organize it? I have an anal-retentive personality, type A all the way. So if something is not perfect, like my website, I stress about it. After a lengthy chat with my professor I finally developed a system of organization that I think will work for me, a new page for every resume element.
As I organized my resume to fit the web, I began to get alarmed again. Advisers, professors, and professionals always tell you to keep the length of your resume down to a page, but a page translated on to a website is next to nothing. The emptiness of my online portfolio made me feel like I had just spent the last four years of my life doing nothing. Even though I know this is not true, I am still going to feel much better when I get links to video packages I have made up on my site.
Even though my online portfolio will never be complete, as I continue to build on and add to it, at least I have a small start. Looking forward, my goal is to have my website up by January so that I have an online resume by the time I start looking for jobs later this year.
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