Whether you’re searching for a new job, making a case for a promotion or raise, showcasing your skills during your annual review, or simply want to be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that may come your way, a professional portfolio is an invaluable tool for any administrative professional.
Your portfolio should include your resume, letters of recommendation, awards and recognitions, past performance reviews, and certifications. However, one of the most crucial parts of your portfolio is your work sample section.
Travel planning skills can be challenging to showcase in your professional portfolio, but they are something many employers and executives are looking for in an admin. So if you have travel planning experience, you need to document it!
The following are some examples of how to document your travel planning abilities in your professional portfolio.
Work Sample: My Travel Planning System
I love to travel! I also love helping those I support travel with minimal hassle and maximum enjoyment.
Over the years, I have developed a number of best practices to help me be the best travel planner and resource I can be for the executives and teams I support, including:
- Best Practice #1:Always prepare a comprehensive travel itinerary. Here is a sample of my travel itinerary. My executives love it – even those who didn’t think it was necessary.
- Best Practice #2: Develop a great travel planning checklist so I always remember to ask about the important details.
- Best Practice #3: Create and maintain a travel profile for each executive or traveling team member.
I have several options for sharing my work samples here:
- I could create or upload a PDF with my best practices that includes samples of the documents noted. A more detailed and comprehensive approach like this would be good for annual performance reviews or job interviews.
- I could upload the three documents as three separate work samples. This may be helpful if I don’t have a lot of work samples and want to add multiple files to my social portfolio on LinkedIn or my digital portfolio site.
- Or I can do an overview summary as outlined above with screenshots of the documents so viewers can see a representative image of each component of my system. This would be a simple way to summarize my experience and give a preview of it without going into a lot of details on my digital portfolio site. Here is an example: https://julieperrine.wordpress.com/professional-portfolio/travel-planning/.
How you’re using the work sample should dictate which option is the best way to showcase it in your professional portfolio.
Many travel planning work samples are self-explanatory. For instance, if you include a sample itinerary or a planning checklist you developed, there’s not really a need to go into a lot of detail.
If there’s any chance that the someone reviewing your professional portfolio might be confused about what skills it’s meant to showcase or why you included it, it’s best to bring it up to P.A.R.
P.A.R. stands for:
- P – Project or problem
- A – Action
- R – Result
If you’d like more information on how to bring your work samples up to P.A.R., this post can help!
Do you need some assistance creating your professional portfolio? Here’s your one-stop shop for all our professional portfolio development tools!
© 2023 Julie Perrine International, LLC
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Julie Perrine, CAP-OM, is the founder and CEO of All Things Admin, providing training, mentoring and resources for administrative professionals worldwide. Julie applies her administrative expertise and passion for lifelong learning to serving as an enthusiastic mentor, speaker and author who educates admins around the world on how to be more effective every day. Learn more about Julie’s books — The Innovative Admin: Unleash the Power of Innovation in Your Administrative Career and The Organized Admin: Leverage Your Unique Organizing Style to Create Systems, Reduce Overwhelm, and Increase Productivity, and Become a Procedures Pro: The Admin’s Guide to Developing Effective Office Systems and Procedures.
