Terminal Portfolio Directions

Overview

Turing provides a space for professional portfolios on our website. These portfolios can be used during your job hunt - you can send out links to your profile, and Turing staff may share your profile to employers who come to us asking for candidates.

How to Set It Up

You will receive an email invitation from the Career Dev team inviting you to create a Terminal profile. If you have not received this invite, you can request an invite by reaching out to Megan McMahon - @megan on slack.

To set up your profile:

Log into Terminal at https://terminal.turing.edu/developers/sign_in
Go to “Edit Profile” from account menu
Fill out profile until all sections are complete
A Career Specialist will review your profile and approve for publishing or request additional changes
For more info on how to set this up, watch this demo

When your profile is complete:

Make sure you’ve met the requirements for publication.
Click “Request Review”
A Career Specialist will review your profile and approve for publishing or request additional changes to be completed before it can be published.

Once published, your profile will be visible on the main alumni directory at terminal.turing.edu/profiles as long as you are participating in job search support until you get your first job. While you are actively job searching, the Career Dev team will use your portfolio in referrals to companies.

About Me Section

What do you want your profile to say about you? Write out a rough draft of your professional story considering using this framework:

What is your career story about your past, present, and future that you want to share with employers?
What prior experiences are relevant and transferrabe to the tech industry?
What impact you want to have in software development?
What kind of company and culture are you passionate about adding value for?

In this section, make sure to answer the following questions:

Who am I?
Why am I in this field?
What’s next for me?

Show readers who you are by telling a story of your journey into tech. Share enough for them to want to hear and learn more!

Your Terminal about me section, LinkedIn summary, and resume summary (if you chose to use one) should all be slightly different.

First, you want the reader to learn something new with each profile
Second, each summary has a different purpose; think about the audience
- Resume summaries should tell why you are the best candidate for the role relevant to the job description.
- LinkedIn summaries allows you to add a personal touch in addition to relevant skills and experiences that will attract recruiters and hiring managers.
- Terminal is similiar to the LinkedIn audience; employers want to know your backstory, your value proposition and what’s next for you as a developer.

Project Descriptions

The main recommendation here is to remember that you are speaking to potential employers, not investors. These project descriptions should briefly describe the project, and then quickly pivot to describing your primary contributions and the things you learned. This is an advertisement for you, not the project. Be consistent in your project descriptions. Too often students use different formats and headings for each of their project descriptions. It can help your audience of potential employers to quickly digest this information if you are even consistent between projects in the order in which you provide information.

For example:

First sentence: name of project, number of collaborators, primary technologies used, what it does.
Second sentence: main learning goals of the project/the things you were doing for the first time in this project (if you don’t know, ask your instructors).
Third sentence: any stretch goals you were able to achieve.
Fourth sentence: anything you specifically focused on in the project.

Find more specifics on how to approach your project descriptions here.

Getting Your Portfolio Published

What needs to be included in order for your portfolio to be published? Here is what the team is looking for:

Nice to have but not required for initial publication:

Pronouns
Skills you are currently learning
Twitter profile
Project collaborators
Deployed Project link

If you have any questions about this portfolio, please reach out to the Career Development team!