Career strategy

What to Include in a Portfolio: The 7-Point Checklist That Works for Any Role

By Dan Kovac · 9 min read

A portfolio should include seven things: your name, role and location above the fold; a bio that says who you help and how; three to five projects or case studies; a career timeline; one clear way to contact you; a recent update that proves the site is alive; and one link you own. Everything else is optional.

That list holds whether you're a designer, an engineer, a product manager or a copywriter. The medium changes. The structure doesn't. This post walks through each item, what to leave out, and how to keep the whole thing alive with ten minutes a month.

The 7 things every portfolio needs

Here's the checklist. Print it, or keep the tab open while you build.

1. Name, role and location above the fold
2. A bio that says who you help and how
3. Three to five projects or case studies (not ten)
4. A career timeline
5. One way to contact you
6. Proof you're alive: a recent post or update date
7. One link that's yours

Now the reasoning behind each.

1. Name, role and location above the fold

Someone landing on your portfolio should know who you are, what you do and roughly where you are within three seconds, without scrolling. "Priya Sharma. Product designer in Melbourne." That's it. Not a riddle, not "Curious human making things", not an animation they have to wait for.

Location matters more than people think. Recruiters and clients filter by it constantly, and "remote from Lisbon" is a location too. Vague headers make people work to place you, and most people won't.

2. A bio that says who you help and how

A good bio answers two questions: who do you do your best work for, and what changes when you do it? Two or three sentences is plenty.

Weak: "Passionate full-stack developer with 8 years of experience across various industries."

Better: "I build internal tools for logistics companies: the unglamorous software that saves ops teams hours a week. Lately that's meant a lot of React, Postgres and arguing for fewer features."

The second one is quotable. A hiring manager can repeat it to a colleague. That's the test: could someone describe you accurately after reading it once?

3. Three to five projects, told properly

This is the core of a professional portfolio, and it's where most people get the maths backwards. Ten thin projects are worse than three deep ones. Nobody reads ten. They read the first two, skim the third, and form their opinion.

Pick the three to five pieces of work that best represent where you want to go next, not everything you've ever done. For each one, cover the situation, what you actually did, and what happened as a result. A screenshot with a one-line caption isn't a case study; it's a thumbnail. The point of the piece isn't the artefact, it's the thinking wired to it: the decision you made and why. If you want the full structure, we've broken it down in our case study template.

Not allowed to show the work? Describe the shape of the problem without the confidential detail. "Redesigned the claims flow for a mid-size insurer; call-centre volume for that flow dropped by a third" reveals nothing an NDA cares about and everything a reader does.

4. A career timeline

Your portfolio shouldn't replace your resume, but it should carry the skeleton: roles, companies, dates, one line on what each was about. People hit your portfolio from all directions (a Google search, a conference talk, a mutual contact), and many of them want the quick "where has this person been?" scan before anything else.

The timeline also does quiet work the projects can't: it shows trajectory. Three projects tell someone what you can do. The timeline tells them where you're headed. For where the two documents differ and why you need both, see portfolio vs resume.

5. One way to contact you

One. A mailto link or a short form. Not six social icons in a row, each a coin-flip on whether you actually check that inbox.

The failure mode here is diffusion. If someone wants to offer you work, every extra decision between "I should reach out" and "sent" loses a percentage of them. Pick the channel you genuinely check daily and make it the obvious path.

6. Proof you're alive

A visible update date, a short recent post, a "now" section: anything that signals a human tends this site. A portfolio with a two-year-old copyright notice and a "latest" project from 2023 reads like an abandoned shopfront, and people quietly assume you've moved on or stopped caring.

This is the cheapest item on the list and the most neglected. A three-line note about what you're working on this quarter does the job.

7. One link that's yours

Your portfolio should live at a domain you control, or at minimum a URL that doesn't belong to a feed. On Behance or Dribbble, your work sits one scroll away from a hundred competitors. On LinkedIn, your profile is formatted identically to everyone else's. A link that's yours is the one place on the internet where you set the frame, and it's the link you put everywhere else: email signature, LinkedIn, conference bios, proposals. If you want the case for owning that link, we made it in why you need a personal brand website.

What should you leave out of a portfolio?

Cutting is half the job. Four things to remove:

• Skills clouds. A grid of forty logos or a bar chart claiming "JavaScript: 85%" tells nobody anything. Skills are demonstrated in case studies or not at all.
• Testimonial walls. One or two specific quotes, attached to the relevant project, beat a carousel of praise. Twelve variations of "great to work with!" read as filler.
• Stock imagery. The handshake photo, the laptop-on-a-desk hero shot. Every generic image is space your actual work isn't using.
• Every project you've ever done. Your 2016 work is competing with your 2026 work for attention, and dragging down the average. Archive it.

The pattern behind all four: they add volume, not evidence. A portfolio is judged on its strongest three items and its weakest one. Volume only lowers the floor.

How often should you update your portfolio?

Ten minutes a month. That's the honest answer, and it's the difference between a portfolio and a portfolio-shaped monument.

Most portfolios get built in one heroic weekend, usually mid job hunt, and then never touched again. Eighteen months later the owner needs it, opens it, winces, and rebuilds from scratch. The rebuild costs another weekend. The monthly tend costs ten minutes: add a line to a case study, update the "now" note, swap in a stronger project, fix the date.

A portfolio isn't finished. It's tended. Small, boring, regular beats big and rare.

Why build it while you're still employed?

Because the worst time to build a portfolio is the moment you suddenly need one, and the data backs this up in an uncomfortable way. NBER research using US Census micro-data found that personal networks help people get re-employed after a layoff, but those networks weaken in downturns, precisely because your contacts got laid off too. The safety net thins exactly when you fall.

A public, searchable portfolio reaches past the people you already know. It works while you sleep and while you're employed, which is when the best opportunities tend to arrive anyway. Being findable doesn't guarantee anything, but it changes your odds: an analysis of 38 million applications by Ashby found referred candidates converted from application to interview at roughly 40%, against about 3% for cold applications. Referrals are pre-vetted, so some of that gap is selection bias, but the direction is stark. Being known transforms the funnel, and a portfolio is how strangers come to know how you work before you ever need them to.

So the checklist above isn't a job-hunt task. It's maintenance on a career asset, done in quiet ten-minute instalments, long before any deadline.

What makes a portfolio look outdated?

Stale dates, dead links, and design fashion from two redesigns ago. Specifically: a latest project older than 18 months, a copyright year that hasn't ticked over, broken project links, a bio describing a role you left, and load-time animations that were impressive in 2019.

Notice that almost none of these are design problems. They're tending problems, and the ten-minute monthly habit fixes every one of them.

FAQ

What should a portfolio include?

Seven things: your name, role and location above the fold; a short bio saying who you help and how; three to five case studies; a career timeline; one contact method; a recent update proving the site is live; and a link you own. Depth in a few projects beats breadth across many.

How many projects should a portfolio have?

Three to five. Visitors read the first two properly and skim from there, so every project you add past five dilutes the ones that matter. Choose work that points at what you want to do next, not a complete archive of what you've done.

Do I need a photo on my portfolio?

It helps, but it's not in the essential seven. A decent, current photo makes you memorable and confirms there's a real human behind the site. If you include one, make it recent and reasonably professional. If you'd rather not, a strong bio and named case studies do the trust-building instead.

Should my portfolio include my resume?

Include a career timeline on the site itself, and optionally a downloadable PDF resume for recruiters who need one for their systems. Don't make the resume the centrepiece. The portfolio's job is showing the work; the resume's job is listing the history.

How often should I update my portfolio?

Monthly, in ten-minute sessions. Refresh the "now" note, tighten a case study, check links, and swap in stronger work as it ships. Do a bigger review twice a year. Little and often keeps the site alive without ever requiring a painful weekend rebuild.

Can I have a portfolio without visual work?

Yes. Engineers, PMs, analysts and writers all have "work": it's just shaped like decisions, documents and outcomes rather than screens. A written case study covering the problem, your approach and the result is a portfolio piece, no mockups required.

Spend the ten minutes on the work, not the plumbing

If you'd rather spend your ten minutes a month on the content instead of the plumbing, Flexfolio gives you the whole structure above (profile, case studies, timeline, contact) on one link that's yours, live in minutes. The value isn't the items sitting in a list, it's the wiring between them: each project tied to the experience that produced it, so a reader sees how you think, not just what you shipped. It's built for exactly this kind of tending, whether you're freelancing or quietly keeping your options warm from a full-time role.