Whether you're a or a full-time or maybe you're at the moment, you really need to have some kind of and that usually takes the form of a portfolio. So in today's video, you've got experience or not, I'm going to show you some simple to help you get started so you can build a portfolio that's going to help you win the next project or help you get your next job.

Right, so I' in e-learning for I think, it's approaching 15 years now, I spent quite a bit of time in the and over the last five six years, I', and during that time period, I've both applied for lots of jobs and lots of projects, but I've also lots of people to work as part of my team. So I've recruited instructional designers, I've recruited e-learning developers and one thing really is that somebody who or to work with me on a freelance project, when they have a portfolio it makes the decision so much easier I'm going to work with them or not, and to be totally honest, when I'm choosing people to work with, I generally will probably not even their application they do have a portfolio just because, you know, looking at a CV is great, you can see the experience, you can get an idea of, you know, what level of…, what they have, but you don't really get a real good of their quality of work, you don't really get a way of finding out what their personality is and their , and just, you just get a lot more especially in something like e-learning, which is very visual, you get a lot more information from looking at a portfolio. But, when you start out, it's difficult and I understand that when I started freelancing, you know, like I said, five six years ago, I didn't have many examples that I could show off and actually a lot of the examples I looked at, I wanted to put on my portfolio, I wasn't that proud of and I was thinking, well they kind of looked okay three or four years ago but this isn't really what I wanted to kind of show myself off with today.

So the technique that I used is a really simple technique. I kind of call it the three by three technique, and that is to create three or three portfolio examples and each portfolio example only needs to have three slides. Now you might be thinking: well, hang on a minute, like an e-learning course is much bigger than that. Yes it is, but you don't need to have, you know, if I'm recruiting you, let's imagine that you know you've for a role with me, and I need somebody to be an instructional designer, or an e-learning developer as part of my team, I'm not going to have time to a 50-slide course that you've put on your portfolio I probably realistically only look at the first four or five slides, if that, probably even less because I just want to get a good understanding of usually in this kind of situation, it's the visual side of things, so the , the graphic design, the sound design, I want to, kind of, understand your skills and, you know, where your lies, and not, it's not just a case of looking at the the portfolio example itself.
I also want to see some context around it as well, so why did you create this project, what was your thinking behind that, what did you apply to the project, all of this, kind of, encapsulates into a single portfolio example.

Now this three by three , I'm going to show you some examples in a moment, and these are the examples that I actually built for my own portfolio, and I've had people saying to me in the past, well I haven't got any projects you know, how do I come up with some ideas and I know that I've bitched about Articulate in the past, but Articulate Storyline and Articulate, the Articulate Heroes Community is a great place to get some for little demos and little projects that you can start working on to start your portfolio, and that's exactly what I did. I went to that website, they have an articulate heroes , I think it's like every month or every couple of months, where they come up with a topic and they ask you to go away and create a demo that you can then use in your portfolio. And , I think you can keep these demos short, three slides is probably just to show off some skills. So let's have a look at the demos that I created and you can see that the thought process behind, why I did this, and these are the exact examples that I used to get my first client, so I can this thing works.

Right, so, as you can see this is just a really simple demo, the for this demo was sport and being a soccer fan, I call it football actually, so this is a bit confusing because this is talking about American football and soccer but it's just a simple quiz and I talked about the three by three technique you can use in three slides, this is actually just one slide, and I just use the same slide to build a quiz, so you can see here it's the same slide, it's got different text on screen, I wanted to show my graphic design skills, you can see that there's states on the buttons there's audio, there's different buttons, I just wanted to show my design skills. I've got some questions, so which sport allows unlimited substitutions during the game? American Football. So you can hear, got some audio which gets a bit annoying when I look back at this five six years later, I probably would have designed this slightly differently but you've got some and then we just go through the questions one at a time, so really really simple but I wanted to show off my visual design skills, I wanted to show off my ability, to add some kind of transitions, and animations and audio, and just create a really simple demo I think I knocked this up in a day, so it wasn't a of time and, you know, I think this looked really smart on my portfolio.

Let's look at the next one. This was a medical theme, so there's no audio on this one, again, I just wanted to show off my kind of visual design, really big , 10 medical facts with very little scientific evidence, you can see it's kind of fun and quirky, it's not particularly serious, I just wanted to show off, you know, big bold images, big bold text, there's links in here that you can click on just to show some kind of , my ability to build something in storyline that was kind of important at the time as well, humans shed about 600 000 particles of skin every hour, so I was trying to inject my personality into this, as well, not kind of keep it quite light-hearted and my hope was that somebody would be quite engaged in this and might get all the way to the end, you know, I talked about this three by three technique, if you've only got three slides, that's fine, but actually, you know, if you I think, this is probably 10 or 12 slides, so I realize it's not, you know, three slides exactly, but you can see the concept, it doesn't have to be, you know, a whole kind of big long course.

So that's the second one, let's jump into the third one, this one, this one was a design that I wanted to create, the concept was all about Valentine's Day, yeah I created this mock-up in Storyline and what I wanted to show in this example, was how you could videos into a storyline course, and I wanted to show my skills at creating animations as well, so I created some little animation videos using Videoscribe, which is like the animation tool, so if I click on one, I'll show you an example, we can see here, click on social, it plays a little video clip, it's got music, it's again, it's just quite quirky, I just wanted to show the combination of using Storyline with a another tool as well, like Videoscribe and just again to show a slightly different style of content to the other examples that I've got there as well.

So I hope that was useful. If you've got any comments as per usual just drop them into the comment section the video and please remember to hit the like button and if you're keen to hear more from me. And one last thing, please remember to head over to my website and for my . That's where I share all of my best stuff but thanks very much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.