A CV says where you worked. A portfolio shows how you think.
Somebody has asked you for a portfolio, and the honest answer is that your work lives inside client LMSs you no longer have logins for. This is 15 modules of portfolio already written — a Word document you import, fill with your own projects, and publish as an interactive course rather than another PDF of screenshots.
Free, no email required. Built for instructional designers, learning designers, training managers, capability leads, consultants and facilitators.
See the finished portfolio
Learning & Development Portfolio
15 modules · 222 blocks
This is the template itself, published and running. Read the whole thing in your browser — no signup, no email.
What a portfolio shows that a CV cannot
A CV is a list of employers and dates. It cannot show how you diagnose a performance problem, how you argue with a stakeholder who has already decided the answer is a workshop, or what you decided not to build and why. Those are the things you are actually being hired for, and there is nowhere on a CV to put them.
Building the portfolio as an interactive course does something a PDF cannot. The visitor is inside a piece of your design work while they read about your design work — the navigation, the pacing, the way a case study unfolds, the knowledge checks you chose to include and the ones you did not. If you claim you design good learning, the portfolio is the evidence, not the claim.
It also survives the thing that kills most portfolios: it is a link. You send one URL and update it in place. Nobody is reviewing a fourteen-megabyte attachment from two roles ago.
What is in it
Fourteen modules for the visitor, grouped into the six stages the portfolio moves through. Module 0 is a fifteenth module written for you — the build guide, the asset list and the honest advice about what to leave out. You delete it before you publish.
Who I am
Enough context to place you, without turning into a second CV.
- Welcome
- My professional story
- Career experience
How I think
The part hiring managers actually read twice.
- Areas of expertise
- My learning philosophy
- My design process
- Frameworks and models I use
How I work
What you are like on a project once the kickoff meeting is over.
- Projects, stakeholders and change
- My toolkit
What I have built
The evidence. Three worked case studies come with the template.
- Selected case studies
- Portfolio gallery
What I have achieved
Depth in the parts of the craft people forget to ask about, and proof.
- Performance support, assessment and accessibility
- Results, evidence and recognition
Let us connect
One clear next step, rather than an email address in a footer.
- Working together
The frameworks module covers ADDIE, SAM, Bloom’s revised taxonomy, Kirkpatrick, ADKAR and Kotter — each stated accurately and briefly, with space for you to say how you actually use it and when you do not. Anyone can recite the definitions. The part worth reading is your judgement about them.
How you make it yours
The document ships with somebody else’s work in it. These five steps are what replace it with yours.
- 1
Download the document
An ordinary Word file. Open it in Word, Google Docs or Pages and read it end to end before you change anything. Module 0 is a build guide written for you rather than for a visitor — it covers what to include, what to leave out, and every asset you need to find first.
- 2
Import it to CourseConverter
Create a free account, choose New course and upload the file. The headings become 15 modules and the content arrives as blocks, callouts and interactions. You are looking at a working portfolio before you have written a sentence of your own.
- 3
Replace the sample content with your work
Twenty-eight sample callouts hold realistic first-person writing — a design process, a philosophy, a case study — for you to overwrite. Every one has to be replaced or deleted before you publish. There are also 105 placeholders in double curly braces for anything personal, and 14 setup callouts marking assets you supply: a headshot, screenshots, your CV file, and an optional 60 to 90 second intro video.
- 4
Choose three to six projects worth showing
Not everything you have built. The build guide uses SCALE to decide — Scale, Complexity, Achievement and impact, Learning expertise, Evidence — and it is blunt about the last one: a project you cannot show evidence for is usually the wrong project to include, however proud of it you are. It also covers anonymising client organisations properly and getting written permission before you quote a testimonial.
- 5
Publish it and send the link
Set your colours, publish, and you have a URL to put on your CV, in an application, in your email signature or in a LinkedIn message. Update a project and republish. There is no PDF to re-export and no version anyone is holding an old copy of.
A placeholder looks like {{YOUR NAME}} or {{CURRENT ROLE TITLE}}. Search the course for the opening brace pair and you will find all 105 of them.
You are not starting from a blank page
Most portfolio templates hand you a heading and a prompt — “describe your design process” — which is the same blank page with a question mark on it. This one is written out. The 28 sample callouts contain realistic first-person content: a stated philosophy, a described process, projects with numbers attached. You are editing somebody’s answer rather than inventing your own from nothing, and disagreeing with a draft is far faster than starting one.
Three fully worked case studies come included — an eLearning transformation, a systems training rollout and an instructor-led workshop programme. Each follows the same structure, which is the structure you then reuse for your own:
- The challenge, and who the audience actually was
- The goal, stated as something measurable rather than as a deliverable
- Your role, and honestly what parts were not yours
- The approach you took and the solution you shipped
- Tools used, and the obstacles that changed the plan
- The outcome, the evidence behind it, and what you learned
The samples are worth reading even if you never publish a word of the template, because they show the level of specificity a case study needs to be worth reading. They are also unmistakably not yours, which is the point. Every sample callout has to be replaced or deleted before you publish, and none of them will slip through looking like something you wrote.
Have the link ready next time
Download the document, import it, and spend an evening on the three projects you are proudest of. The free plan is enough to build the portfolio and publish it.