Welcome to Build Your Portfolio. After watching this video, you will be able to: Identify the importance of a portfolio Explain how to build a portfolio List projects to add to your portfolio Study can help you in getting a job, but you will have to put in some work as well. Many courses will equip you with job-oriented skills, and you can certainly use their certificates to enrich your resume. You can also display your knowledge during an interview. However, a professional portfolio is an effective tool to highlight your skills and demonstrate your ability to grow, and an employer can take time to examine it carefully. Employers are looking for a range of skills, technical abilities, an ability to communicate, and an understanding of good business practices. All of these can be demonstrated in a portfolio. Examples of relevant previous work might include: If you have enrolled in a degree program, you can add your research or a capstone project to your portfolio. Many people work as freelancers to gain experience, and if you have permission, you can include freelance work. If you have permission, any experience and projects that you have worked on as an intern may be worth including. As you acquire additional data science skills, you should try to work on compelling and increasingly complex projects. If you have worked or interned somewhere and worked on a product that is now launched, note you have worked on it and include a link if possible. You can also look at the job descriptions that you’re targeting, pull out the key skills that they require, and build projects around those skills. Here are some more ideas for creating portfolio content: When you want to understand something on a deeper level, building on the success of predecessors is always a great idea. One example might be coding a neural network from scratch using a research paper. This shows your ability to understand the benefit of research papers and the ability to code your own algorithm without using a predefined library. There are many data challenges hosted by Kaggle, Hacker rank, Leet code, and so on. These competitions are normally focused on real-world problems. Participating and documenting them in your portfolio can be promising if you rank high in the competition. If you create content in the form of a blog or vlog, you should include links to it. This is a terrific way to demonstrate soft skills as well as displaying your technical knowledge and your ability to share with other professionals. You can include course projects or hobby projects in your portfolio by adding a few more details and features. For example, include error logging and handling if the project doesn’t have it. Here are six steps that can help you build a strong portfolio by creating some new projects: To build a portfolio for the job you want, start by understanding which skills you will need to demonstrate. Studying current listings will typically show you which skills are best to highlight in your portfolio projects. When generating your own project ideas, think about the issues you are curious about and how engaging relevant datasets could shed light on a problem. You can also find inspiration from other people’s projects by visiting data science communities. When you have decided on an idea for your project, you will need data. Use a real-world data set, since real data sets are messy and you will need to do some cleaning. Check online repositories that offer free and open access to enormous amounts of public data. Some useful resources include Data.gov, Reddit Datasets, GitHub’s Awesome Data, and Google Dataset Search. After you have chosen a research question and a dataset to work with, clean up the data and perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). This step presents opportunities for you to highlight creative thinking and problem-solving by exploring multiple angles, finding supplemental data sources, and using compelling visualizations. When you have clean data, start applying models to solve your problem. It’s smart to have several projects that display the breadth of your skills and interests hosted on GitHub. GitHub is accessible and familiar to most professionals in technical fields. You can deploy your code on GitHub pages and use basic HTML templates to make the code look professional. Be sure to have some sort of README.md with a description of your project that shows your understanding of how to communicate results. In this video, you learned: A portfolio is an excellent way to showcase your work and skills directly because employers value what they can see in your portfolio and how it reflects what you can do. There are many types of work that you can include in your portfolio to good effect. You can build new projects to make your portfolio stronger. Having a strong resume is primary for job seekers, but there is more than one way to show off your skills. A portfolio can show what you can do in a practical, hands-on way. It is important to emphasize that keeping a portfolio is an iterative process. As your knowledge grows, your portfolio should be updated.
