Abstract
Eportfolios are a powerful tool for business students to gain self-awareness and take control of their learning experiences. Ideally, they can be used as online profiles in the job application process, allowing more authenticity, personalization, and completeness than traditional résumés. In our colleges, eportfolios help students reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and form goals for professional development. Overall, however, our students’ eportfolios lack the professional touch of their résumés. We believe extensive coordination within a college is required to help business students create eportfolios that they can use to market themselves for professional positions.
PERSONAL BRANDING EXPERT and Forbes author Dan Schawbel predicts that, within 10 years, résumés will be a thing of the past. Rather, job seekers will use eportfolios and other online communications to provide information about their qualifications to employers (Schawbel, 2011). Social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, popular with job seekers and employers alike, illustrate how much information job seekers can place in a single online location. Eportfolios are a tool that can function much like LinkedIn, whereby job seekers can better portray their accomplishments and other qualifications by providing extensive information and references.
Whether Schawbel’s prediction holds true that eportfolios will replace résumés in the near future is impossible to say; similar calls for adoption of similar tools have turned out to be exaggerated, as this has still not occurred for the vast majority of business students. In any case, we view eportfolios as an essential tool for the workplace of the future and, thus, a component that business communication courses should include. We briefly describe research about eportfolios and then describe our experiences using them.
Background on Eportfolios
Eportfolios systems are not new—they have been promoted and studied for nearly two decades. The advantages of eportfolios that have been identified include providing a comprehensive picture of learners’ achievement and growth, enlarging the view of learning outcomes, involving students in the assessment process, motivating independent learning, communicating learning outcomes to faculty and parents, and creating an intersection for instruction and assessment. Furthermore, the eportfolio platform offers advantages to the digital generation of students by giving them creative opportunities for meaningful reflection through interactive displays of performance and engagement. Research has shown that eportfolios enhance students’ self-esteem by providing a mechanism through which they can monitor their personal, academic, and career goals (Chappell & Schermerhorn, 1999; Cohen, 1994; Engel, 1995; Housego & Parker, 2009; Rossi, Magnoler, & Giannandrea, 2008; Schipper & Rossi, 1997; Willis & Wilkie, 2009).
Most eportfolios are developed with a focus on learning outcomes; these eportfolios can be identified as developmental portfolios. Typically, they provide both evidence of a student’s learning and his/her reflection on work completed. They are a record and evidence of learning and growth supported by meaningful documentation of the learner’s competencies, abilities, and efforts. By contrast, employment portfolios showcase relevant experiences and employment skills that employers use to evaluate the level of work preparation and readiness. Most research about eportfolios has been conducted on developmental portfolios, not employment portfolios (Suskie, 2004).
Cohn and Hibbitts (2004) questioned the excessive enthusiasm for career eportfolios. Although they viewed these tools with hope, they thought proponents of eportfolios were not addressing the potential downsides of eportfolios in preparing students for employment. They wondered,
Do we know for certain that graduating students who bring electronic portfolios to their job interviews will be more competitive than students who furnish paper-based portfolios? . . . Is a technology-enhanced, show-and-tell, glorified résumé truly the best result possible? (pp. 7-8)
Our Experiences with Eportfolios
As far as we know, no research clearly shows how effective eportfolios are when compared with traditional résumés in helping students get jobs. Yet we foresee that students need to be prepared to use eportfolios during their careers to help them secure work. Our colleges have implemented eportfolios as class assignments for our students, and we have formed the following conclusions. Eportfolios are excellent reflection tools. Students become acutely aware of their strengths and weaknesses, more so than by developing résumés. Most students view this assignment as a significant motivation to better prepare themselves for the workplace. This is largely in line with existing research (see Background section above).
High performing students develop fair to good eportfolios; low performing students develop extremely poor eportfolios. Students typically present themselves far better in résumé format than in eportfolios. Furthermore, lower performing students create eportfolios of exceptionally poor quality. We attribute this relatively weak performance on eportfolios when compared with résumés to the following reasons: (a) Students do not have enough professional or relevant items to place in their eportfolios. (b) Students place marginal class work in their portfolios; they sometimes upload class papers, group project presentations, and other documents created at school. Rarely are these items of strong quality. (c) Students summarize—usually in narrative or blog form—everything they have done at various jobs. Without significant revision, these summaries are typically unfocused and unclear. The problems associated with coaching students to produce high-quality, tightly focused, and message-driven résumés are compounded by a factor of 10.
Successful implementation requires extensive coordination and time. Many designers and proponents of eportfolio systems have emphasized that students need to develop eportfolios across their 4-year university experiences (Housego & Parker, 2009; Willis & Wilkie, 2009). In our case, this was not practical, and our students created eportfolios during a single-semester class. We are now working with other members of our colleges to incorporate eportfolios into their courses so that students develop them over time on a single platform. We are also working with other members of our colleges to discuss how to provide more experiences that students can document and display professionally in eportfolios.
Providing good models of eportfolios for business students is essential. Students may have underperformed on this assignment because they have few good models to work from. By contrast, they can easily gain access to thousands of model résumés. Many students simply have no point of reference as they work on their eportfolios, particularly for eportfolios used in the job application process.
Summary
Like the research findings about eportfolios, we have found that they are excellent and engaging tools to help students evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses. However, we are not aware of any of our students using them in place of résumés in the job application process. Furthermore, our students produce résumés of far higher quality than they do eportfolios. We are committed to the eportfolio assignment for our students as a reflection tool and as preparation for developing an online presence in future years. However, we believe that if eportfolios are to become platforms for gaining employment on graduation, many members in our colleges need to make a coordinated effort to help students produce a polished, professional, and compelling online presence.