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Personal Portfolio
Posted by Norman_Oklahoma on October 29, 2020 at 6:14 pmSince way back in the early ’90s, when I first started drafting plans, I have kept a personal portfolio of drawings and other work products quite separate from the company files. I don’t keep every single thing, just things that represent milestones in my professional development, solved an unusual problem, are the product of extended effort, or that just turned out looking really good. At this point I’ve got 4? binders filled, and have just purchased a 5th.
My purpose has been two-fold. One, as a reference to remind myself how I solved an old problem similar to one I’m facing and two, as a sample of my work for potential employers (although no potential employers have ever asked to see such a thing, nor shown much interest when offered). I have also used them to show people under my supervision example mapping, etc.
I wonder if any other among you do anything similar?
ncsudirtman replied 3 years, 5 months ago 15 Members · 19 Replies- 19 Replies
I always email myself copies of my work from work when I am employed there so i can show I did the work, I dont have to beg for a copy when some yutz tries to block my career, for exactly what you mentioned to solve similar problems and to show history of growth and advancing skills.
The exceptions are when its classified, or if I was told never to do so via a signed NDA or similar.
Those I just make sure I have a copy by permission or something similar.
Like a thumb drive. Screw them. I created it.
I need and will use the work to define my abilities. As long as its not classified. The government has way too much time and money.
- Posted by: @norman-oklahoma
I wonder if any other among you do anything similar?
Drawings and other work products? No
But I do have copies of almost every proposal, report, RFQ/RFI response, etc. I’ve written over the last decade or so.
I have DWGs of every drawing I’ve produced in the last 27 years, but then I’m self-employed. I don’t have copies of much from my days as an employee, but I don’t suppose that really matters much for someone in my situation.
I keep a copy of my stamped plans and reports for myself. Never know when somebody is going to call with a question from when I worked someplace else, and no longer have access to the records.
I advise the techs who work under me to keep a portfolio of their work for when (if) they apply for the PLS exam. It will save a lot of running around when it’s time to pull the application together.
Why yes I have a personal portfolio… it’s called the courthouse. ????
paper copies? no. but i have 10 years worth of stuff in PDF on various hard drives and back-ups.
and there’s always the county clerks’ websites around here- i could quickly dial up dozens of plats with my name on them if needed.
No and yes, since the files are mine anyway. I’m not putting any to the side for a portfolio. There are thousands of my drawings on the interweb anyway. If anyone wants to see them.
I have only two drawings that I’ve personally hung on to and they rest in a drawing tube in the corner of my home office. It’s a boundary survey and topo I did of my property I surveyed and drew while a starving college student using borrowed school equipment and computers/software. At the time I considered it nothing short of a miracle that I could survey, draft up the boundary and create a tin with 1′ contours and breaklines from what I was learning in class. Not my prettiest work, but I did it for my best client. Now there’s a recorders site and a dedicated file room chock full of my drawings and not a one of them means as much to me.
WillyFor the last 22+ years I’ve owned my own shop and have all of my files. Even with that, I have a stack of easements and drawings I prepared while at my former employer. While there I did boat load of utility easements and cell tower sites, back in the beginning of the craze. Amazingly I still refer to them on occasions. If I was smart I’d scan the ones unusual ones for easier reference in trash the rest. It would free up a shelf in my only remaining book case.
When I started doing this the internet, email, and thumb drives were barely a thing at all. PDF had not been invented. Our computers were not networked even within the office. 3 1/2″, 1.44mb floppies were the height of portable storage technology. I was 8 years into my career and already an LSIT when I got my first email. So it was paper, or nothing at all.
@bstrand Bingo!
@norman-oklahoma
wow. one step past the parchment and stone tablets some of the people here were using at the time. 😉 Lighten up you Guys and Gal
I had the HD floppies back then, but wasn’t doing anything that mattered, minus papers and reports for school. I did just fire up my 1989 MacSE30 that still runs like a top, and even says Made in the USA Cupertino, California.
Thumb drive? Email? Floppy whatzits? Cell phones? We had no such things when I started out. #2, #4 and #6 pencils, drafting tables with big sheets of paper and a so-called drafting machine with 45-90 and 30-60-90 triangles, French curves and that green snake for other curves. One learned how to think ahead because once you started a drawing you had better be able to finish it without starting all over on a different scale. Copies were either letter size from a crappy little copier or blueprint sized. Nearly everything was drawn on paper. A cemetery lot plan survey was one of the few times we attempted ink on linen. Some area determinations were made with a planimeter. Topos using plane table, alidade and stadia.
Some of my earliest entries were full sized blueline prints which I undertook to scan and print onto smaller format paper years later when that became available to me. But those bluelines are not archive quality and so some loss of fidelity is apparent, and now the original bluelines are very faded. Some of the early plats were, by county recorder dictate, photo-reduced to 8 1/2″ x 11 size for recording and I was able to get xerox’s of those.
That stuff was all mentioned on a test i took recently. I even purchased a full sized Hamilton Drafting table with the mat and working Parallel bar and it only cost me 20 dollars. Great place to store and work on things. The Old stuff and developing the process of drawing is important. Kind of like learning Latin, building furniture, and hand writing letters. Loss of the use of our brains true abilities is the down fall of modern society, HiJack over….
were the dinosaurs back then friendly or did you have to carry a big blunderbuss?
The one I rode to and from work each day was exceptionally friendly as long as you let it eat someone’s dog along the way. Would let it run out in the pasture during the workday because you most definitely didn’t want it pooping in the parking lot.
I feel like if you don??t value what you have worked on/the time you invested in it then it must not have meant much to you or you might not have given it your best effort. So in that instance you probably don??t keep it or don??t care to know how to locate it again down the road as you place very little value on it
But for many of you in this predicament where surveyors can go back to the courthouse to obtain copies or scans of the work rendered then I can see why keeping a hard copy or even digital records might not be your first priority (not sure I??d let go of field notes or my notes on local control though in case you pick up an adjacent project). For me there??s nothing more valuable than the raw field data, various calculations, preliminary sketches, the CAD files, the permit applications, the PDF??s of the approved plans/maps & all submittals made as well as the other pertinent data related to a project??s completion. There??s very, very few projects that I ever worked on that I considered insignificant enough that I wouldn??t want record of what I did on the project.
I??m fairly young at 31 but sadly it??s tough to remember what I did or ate yesterday – much less a couple years ago or more. My time dedicated to land development projects (anywhere from months to say half a year or more total time depending on project size) means a lot to me. If I was able to either learn a better way of how to do something from another person or make a break through in my own career on how to do something, then I owe it to myself, my bottom line & my future clients to be able to effectively/accurately remember how to do something & in a more expeditious & economical manner. Dan Beardslee??s book points out the story about how you as a professional should be charging for experience & liability rather than just the time/effort spent. My career portfolio in my mind is directly tied to that experience/liability & as others have pointed out its justification to your client the ability you possess whether they ever care to see it or not.
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