How to Create an Instructional Design Portfolio (Examples)

Summary: Whether you’ve just completed ID courses and are striving to build a successful career in this field, or you’re a seasoned pro who wants to do more freelance projects and submit your work for awards, this article will show you how to create great instructional design portfolios as well as explore the top 10 ID portfolio examples of industry pros.

A comprehensive, eye-catching instructional design portfolio is an important tool that allows ID professionals to demonstrate their skill set and stand out to potential clients or employers. We’ve spent numerous hours searching for examples of great ID portfolios and analyzing what makes them appealing and really work. Read on to explore them.

Table of contents:

Why Is an Instructional Design Portfolio a Must for Every Professional?
3 examples of great instructional design portfolios
The top 7 examples of ID portfolios
What should a great instructional design portfolio include?
How to create an instructional design portfolio in 4 Steps
How to create an instructional design portfolio with iSpring Suite Max
Tips on how to put together a portfolio that really works
Useful resources

Why Should You Have an Instructional Design Portfolio?

There are three main reasons you need an eLearning portfolio of your work:

Demonstrate your skills

Even the most experienced instructional designer with profound expertise and quality projects risks being overshadowed by not having an online portfolio. A curated collection of your best work can speak louder than a resume alone ever could. Having your own space to show your eLearning development skills can move your profession to new heights.

Impress potential employers and attract more clients

A well-crafted eLearning portfolio website is your frontline tool for capturing the attention of employers and clients. Having a single place for colleagues, bosses, prospective clients, and others to view your work is important when sending out resumes or tweeting about new software, developments, or research elements.

By showcasing a variety of projects, you illustrate not just your versatility but also your adaptability to different instructional challenges and audiences. Potential employers (or a hiring manager) and clients can envision what you can offer them, which can give you a distinct advantage in the competitive job market.

Determine your development needs

As well, an online portfolio is an excellent place to show your best work and determine where you need to develop your instructional design skills to become even more amazing!

You could also set up an eLearning portfolio to showcase what you’ve mastered and share what you could work on to compare with those around you in the instructional design world. There are numerous instructional design portfolios online today, and it’s easy to find both good and bad examples.

Although comparing your work to that of another person is a fairly fruitless pursuit, learning from their example or using their instructional design portfolios as inspiration is how all the great masters have built and honed their skills.

3 Examples of Great Instructional Design Portfolios

Here you’ll find 3 instructional design portfolios. Some of them are hosted and developed based on pre-existing templates (like Bluehost or WordPress), and some are custom-built. These are presented in no particular order but are good examples of layout, content, and flow.

1. Lila Azouz

Lila Azouz has a clean eLearning portfolio that demonstrates her skills in a variety of design and development tools and perspectives.

Content is organized into categories such as educational games, evaluation, and eLearning projects, allowing visitors to quickly navigate to the work samples that pique their interest. Each piece is accompanied by a brief description of Azouz’s role in the project.

The site’s layout makes it easy to contact her, and it protects copyright by password-protecting some client work that cannot be publicly displayed.

Visit Lila Azouz’s portfolio →

2. Cath Ellis

Cath Ellis has given a lovely modern look and feel to her online portfolio and displays her instructional design projects by technology type. She also uses easily recognizable icons and navigation that help one feel comfortable when looking at her examples or moving around in her eLearning portfolio.

By clicking on the project card, you can read about the client’s task, tools used, techniques employed, and other information that may be helpful to future clients.

Visit Cath Ellis’ portfolio →

3. Shalini Mathias

Shalini Mathias has a really engaging, non-standard portfolio site in the style of an interactive map that was built with the Prezi presentation software. As one navigates the map, they are introduced to the various projects she has contributed to.

While Prezi isn’t as popular as it once was, this is a great way to demonstrate both knowledge and skill in different types of learning technologies.

Visit Shalini Mathias’ portfolio →

The Top 7 Examples of ID Portfolios

While the portfolios mentioned above are commendable for their structure and content, not all have a contemporary aesthetic. The visual appeal of a portfolio is a crucial element that affects the overall impression it makes.

After scouring social networks and Google, we’ve curated five additional instructional design portfolio examples that are sure to impress employers and gain the trust of the target audience. Feel free to explore them:

1. Anna Poli

Anna Poli‘s instructional design portfolio captivates with its intuitive and visually appealing design. Visitors can find everything they need to see quickly, thanks to its well-organized layout.

Anna’s expertise shines through concise project descriptions, making it easy for people to grasp her abilities at a glance. The online portfolio impresses with its seamless user experience and showcases Anna as a top choice for instructional design needs.

Visit Anna Poli’s ID portfolio →

2. David Leisey

David Leisey‘s instructional design portfolio site has a clean look and is easy to navigate. It showcases several projects with a description of the audience, goals, tools used, and a detailed instructional design process of David’s work from action map to final results. On the About page, you can learn about David’s background and read about his approaches.

Visit David Leisey’s portfolio →

3. Caroline Roberts

Caroline Roberts‘ portfolio is well designed and contains all the information potential clients might need: projects with brief descriptions, testimonials, and contact information.

The “About” page showcases Caroline’s professional skills and educational background. It also presents her from a personal perspective, providing information about her hobbies and family that can create a personal connection and put the client at ease.

Visit Caroline Roberts’ portfolio →

4. Lucy Aguilar

Lucy Aguilar‘s portfolio is eye-catching with its bright colors and vivid language. It contains many facts about her career and life milestones, from moving to the US and working in television to switching to instructional design. There are only a few projects in the Portfolio section; however, you can not only read their descriptions but also see the training modules themselves.

Visit Lucy Aguilar’s ID portfolio →

5. Alex Hoffman

Alex Hoffman has a concise portfolio containing only the most important information. It’s a single page with a short bio, contacts, and several projects. For each project, Alex has indicated the target audience, his role, and the instructional design tools used. He also includes scripts, prototypes, and a brief explanation of the learning approaches used.

Visit Alex Hoffman’s ID portfolio →

6. Chanel Marshall

Chanel Marshall has divided her projects into four sections: eLearning, instructor-led training, learning resources, and instructional design, which makes navigating the site quite convenient. This online portfolio contains various types of content, such as slides, training videos, and online courses, showing Chanel Marshall as a great ID professional who can handle any task.

Visit Chanel Marshall’s ID portfolio →

7. Reagan Laborde

Reagan Laborde showcases her teaching background and publishes scholarly writings on learning technologies and memory. In addition to the projects she has worked on, Reagan has also included formal papers, such as a resume and cover letter, which may be useful to potential employers who may decide to hire this ID.

Visit Reagan Laborde’s ID portfolio →

What Should a Great Instructional Design Portfolio Include?

Before you start creating an instructional designer portfolio, you need to decide what information to include. Based on the examples discussed above, here are our recommendations for what you can consider putting on your own portfolio page:

Your best projects. There’s no need to include all of the projects you’ve been working on for years. Pick the best courses and learning materials that will showcase you as a great instructional designer with a rich professional background. Include a variety of formats, such as eLearning modules, training videos, and written content. For each project, provide a brief description, your role, the objectives, tools used, and the outcomes.
Your photo. This is a must if you want to give a personal touch to your web page, make your visitors feel more comfortable, and gain their trust.
About. This block is optional, but it gives you an opportunity to tell your story. You might include your professional background, hobbies, your ID journey, and what drives you in this field. Tell a bit about your daily life; it will give visitors a sense of who you are beyond your professional achievements and help you build rapport with prospects.
Testimonials. Incorporate feedback from previous clients or colleagues to add credibility to your work and provide an outsider’s perspective on your professional capabilities and work ethic.
Areas of expertise. You can highlight your specialties within instructional design, such as curriculum development, multimedia learning, or learner engagement strategies, to help clients or employers understand where you can add the most value. You can also mention your extensive experience in developing eLearning courses for healthcare or other industries in which you work most often.
Contact info. Make it easy for potential clients or employers to reach out to you. Include your professional email address, phone number, and links to your professional social media or LinkedIn profiles.

How to Create an Instructional Design Portfolio in 4 Steps

The examples we presented above were not built overnight. To create an informative and impressive portfolio, you need to do some preparation work, analyze your experience, and decide what you’re going to share with the world.

Let’s look at these 4 steps you’ll want to consider before you build your portfolio. Сheck out this infographic for an overview:

How to Create an Instructional Design Portfolio in 4 Steps

Step 1. Develop your personal brand

The first thing to consider is the approach to content, or how viewers will see you and your brand. Consider why you are building this work of art and what you want it to say about yourself and your work.

Build a persona for your social media presence.

Take a look at your online presence from an external perspective. Is it all over the place, with your personal and professional worlds mashed together? This is okay, if that’s what you want. But if you don’t, now is the time to consider what you want your online persona to be and start to shape your portfolio to reflect that.

Who are you building this portfolio for: employers, grad school, or clients? Create a persona of who that ‘person’ is (just like creating personas for the learners in your programs!) so you can position the samples in a way that viewers will find interesting and appealing.

You may want to consider several different views of your portfolio tailored to the groups that you want to attract to view your work. If you haven’t seen one before, you may want to use an empathy map.

An empathy map is a picture of your client, audience, or employer. It takes an outsider’s view (a view that’s empathetic to the situation and environment of the person who is viewing the portfolio). It makes a list of what your viewer will be exposed to in their current circumstances, what they know about ID, what they face in their work environment, what they are hearing from their bosses, clients, and employees, and other things that allow you to see your portfolio from someone else’s perspective.

Look around! Make a collection of elements, pages, samples, layouts, etc. to inspire you.

Of course, no one is advocating stealing or copying here, but many artists have used others’ works as inspiration for their own projects. These are often referred to as “mood boards.” A mood board is a collection of images, colors, layouts, texts, and navigation from all over the Internet that you feel would be representative of you, your brand, and your message.

Here’s an example:

If you’ve been working in a corporate environment with strict branding guidelines, you’ve seen examples of the company’s mood board. The collection of colors, fonts, images, layouts, and language styles should be consistent and reflect the persona you are trying to promote (which, ultimately, should be you).

Assembling a mood board will help you identify the style and brand you want to create for yourself. Use it when looking at the templates or sites that you will choose to set up your portfolio.

Step 2. Assemble the content for your portfolio

Are you aiming to get a new job, take on new clients, or expand your professional network and reputation? To accomplish any of this, you’ll first need to consider the content you have and prepare eLearning samples to include.

Begin gathering your work

Collect all the work that you want to represent in your portfolio and categorize it.

If you have a very large portfolio or have multiple potential types of viewers, you may want to categorize them using a grid, such as type of сlient vs. modality, industry vs. timeline, and client vs. budget. It’s your call to determine how to make your samples super easy to use.
If you have more offline than online samples, you can convert your face-to-face PowerPoint and workbook samples to HTML5 format if you prefer (using authoring tools like iSpring Suite), or you can post thumbnails of your work.
If you have work that is restricted by an NDA or can’t be used due to a contract, you can still take sample slides that are representative of your work and remove identifying marks, names, or other elements. There has to be some work you’ve done that isn’t entirely restricted by an NDA. (If there isn’t, you’ll need to make some generic samples for display and mention that they represent the work you did for the employer.)
If you only contributed part of the design, writing, or coding for the project, that’s okay! You will need to tell the story of how you collaborated, what you contributed, and how it worked out. Just don’t misrepresent others’ work as your own.

Tell the story of each sample

Each of your samples should have information relevant to your audience (remember your audience personas and write for them!). In some cases, you will want to outline your contribution, the tools used, the context for the development (the intended audience and time period), and the outcome.
Your samples should tell the story of how you used a variety of ways to solve problems with design, accessibility, client management, or something that demonstrates not only your technical proficiency but also your style, your ability to manage or participate in collaborative work, and your overall professionalism.
If you are grouping your projects by industry (e.g., healthcare, defense, or banking), consider an opening paragraph before the samples summarizing your experience in the industry, including your role titles, level of authority or influence, and overall length of time in the industry. Potential hiring managers in that industry will appreciate your relating to them specifically.

Step 3: Create and optimize your portfolio

Now you have to put your eLearning portfolio online. Even if you aren’t experienced with websites, hosting, or other elements of cyberspace, it’s pretty easy to navigate if you stick to platforms built for people who aren’t coders. Here are several options you can consider to create and host your ID portfolio website or page:

1. iSpring Suite Max

iSpring Suite Max is a comprehensive content authoring tool. Its advanced subscription features iSpring Space — an online tool for storing, reviewing, and creating eLearning projects. Unlike other platforms, it has a portfolio builder designed specifically for instructional designers, course developers, and other eLearning specialists. You don’t need any extra platforms, tools, widgets, etc. Simply create your portfolio using the prebuilt layout and share a link to it with potential clients or employers.

The key benefits of this option are that you can upload your actual SCORM courses (this is rarely a possibility) and that the layout template is tailored to instructional designers’ needs, showing clients everything you want them to see: your name, bio, the tools you use, and your projects with descriptions. So, it’s really easy to build an appealing, effective portfolio without any coding, converting projects to HTML5 or video formats, etc.

You can also make the portfolio feel truly yours by customizing colors and fonts – it only takes a few minutes to create something authentic and unique. Further on, we’ll provide detailed instructions on how to create an ID portfolio with iSpring Suite Max.

An ID portfolio created with iSpring Suite Max

2. Hosted portfolio platforms

In this type of setup, the website, server (that will host your designs and eLearning samples), and everything else, are handled for you by a single company. The benefit of this is that they are purpose-built for portfolio use and easy to use and maintain, as they have preset templates for making a portfolio website. And although these portfolio sites often don’t come with a lot of templates (especially free ones), they do give you a chance to create a portfolio website with basic technical skills and no programming requirement.

Some of the most popular portfolio website builders are Behance, Dribble, and Adobe Portfolio. Keep in mind that these portfolio websites are usually for visual artists and graphic designers, so you may not be able to do more than show individual slides or images unless you pay for more storage space on the site and the widgets that allow you to show interactive pieces (like eLearning courses).

Examples of design portfolios created in Dribble

3. Website platforms (business websites)

The benefit of these types of sites, beyond just portfolio-specific sites, is that there are more types of templates (not all of which are relevant) and widgets to add contact methods, social linking, etc. that you may find useful if you are or will consider being a freelancer. Website platforms provide ready-made templates, hosting, storage, layout, and other widgets. You don’t need to know how to write HTML code, JavaScript, or any other type of programming to get beautiful results.

Many of these sites are free if you don’t select the ‘premium’ templates. The platforms are easy to use, and the most popular ones include WordPress, Weebly, and Wix. These sites have hundreds of templates and widgets for people who want to make an online entrance but aren’t programmers or media companies. Keep in mind that there is a huge difference between the .com and the .org versions of WordPress. If you don’t know how to program HTML, you’ll want the .com version.

Like the portfolio website platforms, you will need to pay for the ability to use widgets that will host your eLearning samples and make some things interactive, like contact widgets and video spaces.

4. Self-hosted websites

If you know coding or can manage HTML, building your own website will be the best solution because it helps you control all your design and data. Of course, you don’t have to start completely from scratch, as there are plenty of codebases you can download and then use to help you optimize your time. Probably the site and codebase that are used most for this is WordPress. Unlike the hosted version, wordpress.org is a downloadable HTML program that you can use to create your own site and manage your widgets or navigation for your users. Of course, if you’re an instructional design developer, you may want to take this route to demonstrate your skills.

If you are going to choose this option, you will need the base code, a domain host, and probably some widgets and add-ons from the WordPress library.

Step 4: Promote your instructional design portfolio

You have built this instructional design portfolio for a reason, and that’s to get noticed. However, you won’t get any visibility if you don’t let people know your portfolio is available! There are a couple of great ways to get your portfolio out there and improve your overall presence:

Use social media to let people know that you have a new portfolio. What social media platforms do you connect with: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or Instagram? Others? Tell your collaborators, friends, and followers to check it out. Offer to discuss anything they see or share experiences.
Join a professional group or association. Are you a member of the ATD? eLearning Guild? CCCE? There are many local, national, and international learning associations through which you can promote yourself and your portfolio while contributing to the profession and learning from the experiences of others.
Use good old-fashioned word of mouth! It’s amazing how many people will be willing to help you spread the word about your new portfolio site and even give you additional work if you ask. It’s not a burden to talk to people about what you are hoping to do. If there is quality in your work and your relationships, having a good conversation can really facilitate the promotion of your portfolio site and perhaps your instructional design career.

How to Create an Instructional Design Portfolio with iSpring Suite Max

If you don’t want to worry about domain registration or buying extra widgets, you can use iSpring Suite Max — a single tool for creating eLearning courses, training videos, interactive assessments, and role-plays and showcasing them to the world. To create an instructional designer portfolio with this tool, follow these steps:

1. If you don’t have an iSpring Suite Max subscription yet, download a 14-day free trial.

2. Click on the iSpring Suite icon, and then click on your profile in the top-right corner. In the drop-down menu, select Open iSpring Space.

3. Then, upload the projects you want to show in your portfolio to iSpring Space and select My Portfolio.

4. Click on the Add project to portfolio field.

5. Find the project you want to add, and click on Select.

6. Add the project’s name, description, and cover image. Click on Save.

Project Properties in Suite Max Portfolio

Repeat this process with other projects. To change the order of the courses in your portfolio, simply drag them to the desired location.

7. Once you’ve added all the projects, add info about yourself. Click the Edit button under your avatar. In the opened window, fill in the blanks with your bio, profession, work experience, and the tools you use. Click on Save.

8. Finally, you can make the portfolio feel like you! Click on the settings button in the upper-right corner. Customize the colors and fonts of your portfolio page. Once finished, click on Save.

Selects fonts and colors of your portfolio

And that’s it. Your concise, eye-catching portfolio was prepared within minutes!

Important: In a trial account, course authors can create a portfolio but cannot share it. However, if you purchased a subscription to iSpring Suite Max, you can do that easily. Click Share in the top right corner, enable Make viewable via link, copy the link, and post it wherever you wish.

Tips on How to Put Together a Portfolio That Really Works

As an instructional designer, you know a great deal about designing information in a way that helps the learner acquire knowledge and skills. Do some homework by looking over the websites mentioned above and figuring out how your portfolio fits with your personality and how you intend to present your work to your audience. Here are a few more tips you may find useful:

Make your websites fully accessible for those who may need special accommodation due to issues regarding sight, mobility, or language. Accessible design is good design.
Make sure you have your contact information prominently displayed in the header or footer of the site. Ensure that you also have working contact buttons where needed, but not buried at the bottom left or right corner of any page.
Continue to review and update your projects and work samples so you can always present a fresh perspective on how you are progressing.

Summing Up

Creating an instructional design portfolio is a professional activity that will help you keep your skills honed, allow your design abilities to shine for others to see, and provide you with more credibility in the world of learning design and development. Instructional designers and other learning professionals need digital representation now more than ever, as the world becomes more globally connected and less reliant on word of mouth or resumes to get work. Your portfolio should be carefully thought out as part of your professional brand and a reflection of your true abilities. You can do this by carefully preparing your content, creating a site that is easy to use, and delivering an accessible experience to all of your prospective clients, employers, hiring managers, and colleagues.

Useful Resources

Whether you’re a novice ID who wants to delve deeper into instructional design or a seasoned professional who wants to refresh their knowledge, check out some more articles about ID and course authoring:

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Content creator

Helen Colman

She enjoys combining in-depth research with expert knowledge of the industry. If you have eLearning insights that you’d like to share, please get in touch.