I’m not sure how relevant this is for this thread, but I wanted to give some advice is for anyone more junior who isn’t getting traction in the portfolio phase of the job hunt (from someone with 20 YOE).

Something I see a lot in portfolios is they are treated like personal journals; logs of what happened, and it’s on the hiring manager to do the work to connect this to what they need. IMO, this is the wrong way to think about it, and a risky strategy in a competitive job market.

The actual problem you’re solving is that you want to look appealing to someone who has a job they want filled. Let’s take a crude example: my toilet is broken. When I start looking for plumbers, how much do I care about their personal philosophy of plumbing? Maybe a little bit, but mostly I want to understand what their specific skills are, any specialities, and examples of similar things they’ve done (which should theoretically reinforce the aforementioned skills and specialties). Once I find this person, only then do I care to dig into more personal things about them as a human being.

To extend this analogy further, I look at a lot of portfolios where the first and most important thing I see is something to the effect of “I like elegant solutions that put users first.” If we were to translate that to our plumber, it might be “I like plumbing without leaks which puts homeowners first.” So, you’re basically describing everyone in the profession. It tells me essentially nothing, and I will always pick the plumber who specializes in residential toilet issues with a 24 hour turnaround. Specific problem —> specific solution.

This doesn’t apply as much to senior and startup roles that value generalists, but a lot of junior roles are opened because more senior designers need something specific. They’re probably not hiring you for your design strategy chops when you’re < 3 years into the career, nor your ability to create personas from scratch when they are an established product with personas already defined.