Did you go to college? If you did you’ll want to show off your skills. If you are an arts or humanities student that is relatively straight forward. You can place links to your online portfolio of art, writing or photography into the body of your email or even on your resume itself.

If you have an engineering degree how you display your talents is different. But an engineering portfolio is equally as important as an art or humanities portfolio. This is how you decide what to include in an engineering portfolio and some engineering portfolio examples.

Protecting Your Engineering Designs

One of the key distinctions between an art portfolio and an engineering portfolio is how you protect your work. Work such as a writing portfolio or photographs are protected under copyright laws. However, designs are not. To protect a design you need a patent from the U.S Patent and Trademark Office.

To get one costs a fee and you have to prove that the design is original and unique.

If you’ve got a great engineering design or you did a project at college then you might want to write about this in limited detail if you feel the project is valuable in any way. Consult your college and ask the advice of a lawyer if you are concerned.

Add Pictures

It can be easy to think that if you are applying for jobs that are very technical you should keep your portfolio to text or designs and plans only. However, this is dry and boring. Although it is important to be professional a greate engineer is one that understands how what it is on paper can translate into the finished product.

Be sure to add in any pictures of the products you have designed. If you are a structural engineer these images could take the form of a computer-generated image of proposed buildings you are working on. It could even just include a picture of the skeleton or frame. If you are lucky enough to have worked on projects which are now complete you could provide photos of the finished buildings.

Journal Your Projects and Ideas

Plans, pictures and structural diagrams make no sense on their own even to people trained as engineers. Employers also want to know about your project planning and how you overcame challenges on each project you were involved in. You can include some of these details in a cover letter and resume. Ensure that your resume meets the 60-second test.

If you are struggling with formatting your cover letter then be sure to check out these cover letter templates.

However, also consider a journal in which you can go into much more detail. It’s a great way to show to your employer that you will be just as good at managing projects and working in an office and on-site as well as working on your own.

An Engineering Portfolio Can Be Great If It’s Presented Right

If you are an engineering student then an engineering portfolio can be the right path to wowing over employers. But be sure to include a journal to describe the challenged you faced on each project as well as images to illustrate the nature of your project.