Professional Portfolio,” by Allison Stein

Professional Portfolio Allison Stein Diane Boehm e-Portfolio Award

Allison Stein is a professional and technical writing major and general business minor. A native of Harbor Beach, Michigan, she enrolled at SVSU in Fall 2018. At SVSU, she is the secretary for the Association of Professional and Technical Writers and a member of the Usability Research Team. Allison also writes a monthly column for The Lakeshore Guardian (a newspaper covering the thumb area of Michigan) and has published three poetry books through Stein Expressions, LLC. She intends to pursue a career as a writer and editor.

Allison developed her portfolio in Internship I in Professional and Technical Writing (RPW 328), taught by Dr. Bill Williamson, professor of rhetoric and professional writing. The work application portfolio is directed at future employers in the professional/technical writing field and potential clients who need a technical writer. Its purpose is to showcase Allison’s breadth and depth of professional development and to prove her readiness for job opportunities in the technical communication field.

Allison’s portfolio currently showcases three significant projects: 1) a software user guide in written and video formats based on persona mapping, a task analysis flowchart, and data from usability studies; 2) planning, publishing, and marketing materials from her 80-page book, Trust the Wind; and 3) a recruitment plan for a local youth group, including materials for a brand identity kit, themed flyers, an event press release, social media content, and a group newsletter.

Allison recommends that college students who wish to create a professional portfolio begin by considering exactly what they want to achieve. A list of personal assessment criteria for an effective portfolio might include objectives that students set for themselves as developing professionals or standards against which they expect future employers to evaluate their work. For this portfolio, Allison identified her two guiding design goals as multimodality (proving herself comfortable with various technologies and media, and being able to do contextually appropriate work) and selfreflection (showing attention to her meta-learning through project narratives and high levels of emotional-intellectual engagement with work and work processes).

Allison created her portfolio with the web design tool Bootstrap Studio. From this project, Allison, who plans to graduate from SVSU in December 2020, learned how to convey a sense of professional identity and how to market herself more effectively as a technical writer. The portfolio project helped her make connections across multiple academic and professional facets of technical writing, giving Allison the opportunity to examine her interests and abilities within and beyond the discipline. Her portfolio may be accessed at allisonstein.bss.design.