As you close out your broadcast degree, you need to prep yourself for the next stage in your life: a professional career. If you are lucky, you may just receive a job offer right out the gate. Naturally that would be great, but realistically it doesn’t happen to many people. So you need to showcase your broadcast skills with a digital portfolio outlining what you focused on in school, such as editing, sound mixing or anchoring (just to name a few).

YouTube

You need to get your sizzle reel out there. If you are a motion graphics designer, you want to make sure it is incredibly easy for possible employers to find you and there really is no easier way than YouTube. You don’t need to pay any money, and in fact you could even make a few dollars by turning on the ad feature.

Carbonmade

Carbonmade.com provides a beautifully designed canvas where you can showcase work. You can place your personal logo, portfolio content and other information in a colorful way that looks great and really stands out.

Personal Website

Having a personal website is probably the very best way to showcase your material. Embedding videos to your website is easy (especially if you have already uploaded the content to YouTube). Images of still work, displaying your resume and even a personal blog can all make your website attractive to showcase your broadcast skills.

When it comes to creating your personal website, using an online Website builder is perfectly fine. However, you might want to pay the few extra dollars to have your own domain, instead of one that features the title of the website building service (like Webs, SquareSpace or others).

As a student with The Ohio/Illinois Centers for Broadcasting, students are required to complete their own webpage before graduation. These personal sites are routinely reviewed by the graduate and a Career Services Representative to ensure their site is up-to-date and ready to be presented to a potential employer at any given time.

Social Media Image Services

If you work with graphics, you need to get on the image-based social media bandwagon. Connecting your image social media accounts to your Facebook, Twitter, website, YouTube and others is a great way to bring in more traffic and to connect to other professionals.

If you create logos or graphics for on-air production, you want more eyes on that material, so using the already established social media services is a good idea. Other options you should utilize are Tumblr and Flickr. Flickr is an image hosting service while Tumblr is more of a visual blog, but you can tag your images with hashtags, making it easier to connect with other professionals searching for a specific keyword.

Instagram can be helpful as well due to the sheer number of users, but the downside to this is you are forced into the boxed-off Polaroid style of imaging.

So use these tips to get your digital portfolio and online presence in tip-top shape for your job hunt.