Should I organize my portfolio by competency?

It depends on who's reading. The same pieces can be arranged in different ways for different audiences, and the best portfolios usually do exactly that.

For your program: competency works

If your program requires a portfolio to show you met CEPH competencies, organizing by competency makes the reviewer's job easy. For each competency, include:

• The competency, written out, not just its number
• One or two pieces of evidence
• A short note explaining what you did and how it shows the skill

Because one product often demonstrates several competencies, choose a primary home for each piece and cross-reference it elsewhere rather than repeating it. The discussion of competency overlap helps you decide where each piece fits best.

For employers: skill or project works better

Hiring managers rarely think in CEPH competency numbers. They think in job duties like data analysis, program evaluation, health communication, and community engagement. For job applications, group your work by those skill areas, or by project if you have one or two substantial projects. Put the most relevant section first for each job.

You can still mention competencies inside each description. A phrase like "applied qualitative methods to evaluate a program" speaks both languages.

A simple hybrid

A practical approach is to keep one master collection tagged by competency, skill area, and project. Then build views from it:

• A competency-organized version for your program
• A skill-organized version for each type of job you apply for
• A short highlights version for networking

If you tagged activities to competencies as you logged them during the practicum, the Logbook's competency worksheets or your own tracker already give you the raw mapping. See portfolios that stand out for presentation ideas.