The Portfolio Project is a special effort from the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) Committee on Career Development (CCD). The goal of the project is pretty simple…

To offer tools, resources, and technology to scholars and practitioners for developing and cultivating a vibrant, professional online presence.

There is a bit packed into this definition. Let’s break it down a bit.

• Tools, resources, and technology: A functional piece of this project and goal is to offer original content (usually in the form of a blog post hosted at this site) to readers covering a host of topics centered around developing and maintaining a high-quality online showcase. To this end, content will range from interviews with experts and long-form narratives covering key topics and nuanced debates in various subfields, to technical tips and tricks aimed at deepening not only the technical skillset of our readers, but also to demonstrate best practices in showcasing these skills to a wide audience.

• Scholars and practitioners: Though aimed at younger scholars still actively carving out space in an increasingly competitive landscape, our goal is to craft content of relevance to scholars, researchers, and practitioners at all career stages to either learn new techniques and tools, or brush up on existing skills.

• Develop and cultivate: In line with the previous point, we are interested in both helping scholars and practitioners get up and running with high quality online portfolios that showcase their work and abilities, while also helping these and other scholars and practitioners maintain the quality and depth of their online portfolios.

• Vibrant professional online presence: This final bit highlights the core concept at play: the portfolio. The portfolio as we are imagining it, can be thought of a professional home base, linking to other professional sites (e.g., LinkedIn, Github, etc.), as well as a space for scholars and practitioners to offer their own original content in the form of blog posts, lists of research and professional works, and any other content that plays an active role in demonstrating unique technical abilities and skills.

In short, a portfolio is an incredible opportunity to meet the largely expected challenge of “showing, not telling.” This challenge combined with the competitiveness of the fields of statistics and data science imply a need for not only establishing an online presence but establishing a high quality, effective, and convincing online presence. As such, the Portfolio Project from the CCD intends to offer resources to help our members and readers on their way to standing out in this increasingly crowded space.

Note: We are actively developing and expanding this project. So, please reach out to us with any ideas for content, blogs, demonstrations, etc. We are happy to consider any ideas.