Today, I'm working a weekend event for a Physical Therapy conference here at CHS(College of Health Sciences). I'm here to help everyone get set up and stay on call for any technical issues. We're not required to work in these events but we can make ourselves available if we would like to earn some overtime pay. So in most cases we definitely look to work in these events depending on how long they are and if we can pull away from our families. Most of the time our families don't mind if it means extra money. When you're "on call" you have the opportunity to do a lot of extra work. Either job related or school related. In this case, I'm doing some school work :) However, we're in between semesters so there's technically nothing required at the moment BUT you can ALWAYS work on your portfolio.
The best definition that I read once was that a portfolio is a living and changing collection of your accomplishments, skills, and experiences. Without this, companies will only have a resume to look at it, which is just a document. We basically have two portfolios, one is Taskstream which is are required work and the other is our own website, which is what I'm using right now. Portfolio's help you to build your own brand and showcase what you're able to do. There are a lot of good tips, tools and guides for how to create very cool portfolios for any type of field. I'm currently trying to pull ideas from many areas and even in our cohort we will mention and bounce off ideas to each other. I sat through a webinar on how to get a job in Instructional Design and during most of the session, the speaker focused on portfolio work more than anything else. It's a critical part of finding of job. When I graduate, my focus will be on getting a job in Instructional Design and Technology or something related to the field.