It is one thing to constantly seek to improve your work, it is something else however when you use this as an excuse not to seek new opportunities.
I don’t think you will ever have a perfect portfolio. Dare I say it. I don’t think you need one anyway.
You shouldn’t strive to have a perfect portfolio of work. The keyword here is perfect. You see it may come as a surprise but this is stopping you from progressing. There is only so many hours in the day, weeks in a month and months in a year. Do you want to spend that fixing your older works or creating newer work that reflects your current new skill sets and interest? When reworking your portfolio is easy to fall into the trap of ‘I need my work to be perfect for an employer to invite me for an interview or even more so a hire me’. But perfect doesn’t exist. What you see in your work might not be the same thing someone else, whether a tutor or employer might see in your work. This doesn’t mean to say don’t make adjustments to your work, that you should do because after all you want to work with a specific group of designers, and that requires a tailored approach to get hired. What you don’t want to do is get so focused on making everything look great that you dismiss opportunities to get hired altogether.
Your portfolio is a snippet of what you can do, but also what you have already done before.
Sometimes we can underestimate the work we have produced. Remember your portfolio for as long as you have a career, will always be a work in progress, and that you should show it like that. Now, this isn’t to say make it sloppy and send everything to your employer in your sample portfolio. No, that isn’t effective whatsoever, if anything it makes it so much harder to notice and doesn’t look good for you because you haven’t made things easier for you to be noticed. Being selective is what you should be going for, and that is a skill on its own. Not every piece of work has to be perfect, it just has to reflect where you are currently and what mediums you can you well.
Being unemployed is a chance of seeing your work differently
What being unemployed will do is give you endless time (if you don’t have other commitments) to rework everything you have, without a deadline in place. That is where it will hurt you, you aren’t being realistic for yourself after all the work you have produced was produced through a deadline. And architects and designers work with deadlines. This is where you need to be strict with yourself, what is worth my time, truly. If you give yourself too much time you won’t end up with a portfolio at all. Don’t fill your time with altering everything that you have as work. Just what truly needs to be improved because you really can miss great employment positions.
The constant need to improve your work can be stemmed from an insecurity that you aren’t good enough
If you’ve been rejected already, not invited for interviews or even received little to no feedback from any of your job applications this can make you feel doubtful about your abilities. I’ve been there and it isn’t you being productive anymore if you constantly fixate on making this perfect portfolio by not applying to job postings. In fact, the only way you can improve is if you continue to apply but with a different approach, one that will allow you to progress and not stagnate in your job hunt. If you think your portfolio is the only thing that can get you a job you are wrong, it is a CV, cover letter (if requested) and a sample portfolio that gets you a seat for an interview. Your portfolio isn’t the only thing getting you closer to finding work, it’s all these documents and your approach that needs changing up.
Employers know that you are still learning
This isn’t to say don’t apply for job postings that you find ambitious or out of your reach you never know what can happen on the other side. There isn’t perfect formula just like there isn’t one process or one thing that gets you a job, it is a collection of things that get you the job or gets you in a place to be hired. If you are open to learning, you need to say that with confidence and that is what tends to be the case. You can’t expect to be a perfect employee if you haven’t been an employee, to begin with, because it is always subject to change and subjective to each individual regardless of what field you are in. As much as it might not seem that way, employers have started somewhere and will know that candidates have a different set of skills and experience and education, it is more so about what you can offer and what you are willing to learn. I wish I wasn’t so guilty of this but realising that rejection is far more common than invitations to interviews you start to realise that you’ve got to get yourself noticed and you’ve got to do it quickly. Time really is on your side if you choose to use it wisely, don’t let the rejections, voiced or otherwise silently made push you into believing you aren’t good enough, because you are a work in progress, always in your career path. If you’ve graduated or have come through the end of your academic year with a body of work this is testament to the fact that you can be hired because you have used a set of skills to create this portfolio, no matter how great or not so great you think you are at them.
You aren’t going to be perfect because perfect doesn’t exist
We have to decide what to value our time with, no one ever finished writing a book by fixating on chapter 1 of the first draft and nothing else. Add value to your portfolio, exposure is one of them. You can fix your portfolio all that you want but it doesn’t get you the added experience and feedback that you might receive from deciding to showcase your starting point. This is just the beginning of your career, and if you are looking for work it will challenge you but you must accept to change, to make mistakes and to alter the important things to ensure that you’ll get to a place where you can make larger progression and impact in the career you choose to pursue. Stop letting your insecurity hold you back from being productive on your job hunt.