Portfolio vs resume: what to put where (designers, writers, engineers)
Which achievements belong on your resume vs your portfolio, plus how to link between them without repeating yourself.
Portfolios and resumes serve different jobs. The resume proves scope and outcomes; the portfolio proves craft. Candidates who blur the two — cramming portfolio-level detail onto their resume or listing bare projects on their portfolio — end up weaker on both fronts.
What belongs on your resume
- Company, role, dates, scope (budget, team size, users, revenue).
- Outcomes with numbers.
- Skills the ATS is filtering for.
- One-line links to the projects you'll show in the portfolio.
What belongs in your portfolio
- The problem you were solving (business + user context).
- Your specific role on the team.
- Process: research, sketches, prototypes, decisions, tradeoffs.
- Final artifact: screens, code, writing samples.
- Outcome + reflection.
How to link between them
In each role on your resume, add one line: '↗ portfolio case: [project-name]'. Match that project name exactly to a page on your portfolio. Hiring managers who click expect to land instantly on the case study, not your homepage.
The three-case portfolio rule
Three deep case studies beats twelve shallow ones. Each case study should take 3–5 minutes to read. Add work samples grid below for depth without dilution.
FAQ
Should engineers have portfolios?
GitHub with pinned repos + a personal site with 2–3 project write-ups is enough. You don't need Behance-style visuals.
How much of my portfolio should be NDA'd work?
As little as possible. Reproduce protected work as annotated wireframes with numbers obfuscated, or lean on personal projects that make the same point.
Put this into practice.
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