Build your AI Portfolio Before Someone Asks for It
A quick exercise to get you thinking
The writing and content job market is rough right now.
“I use AI in my work” comes dangerously close to I’m “proficient in Microsoft Office” from the old days.
Everyone says it, and it tells a hiring manager almost nothing.
(Let’s not talk about those who refused to use word processors. 😆)
What actually signals competence is documentation, and that’s what many people lack.
Not just that you’ve worked with AI, but how:
what systems you’ve built,
what workflow decisions you’ve made,
and what you’ve tested and revised.
An AI portfolio shows process and workflow … not just deliverables.
Many content professionals haven’t built that deliberately. There just isn’t enough time, right?
You may have used AI and gotten results, but you haven’t documented the strategy and design:
the prompt library,
the style guidelines,
the knowledge sources,
the testing methodology, etc.
That documentation is the portfolio. Without it, you’re left describing a system you’ve built but can’t show.
And if you’ve never built such a system, then you’ve got nothing to document!
So when someone asks, “Show me what you’ve done with AI.” You’ve got nothing, whether you’ve built it or not.
I’ve been thinking about this more lately.
My course Writing with Machines was designed around systematic AI practice: workflow design, prompt development, knowledge integration, style systems, and prompt libraries.
I realized recently that this also produces a portfolio. I just haven’t made that explicit enough, so I thought I would share the final exercise below that I used with my university students as the capstone to their own portfolios.
The exercise below asks students to use AI to generate their final reflection and cover page to their portfolio.
Its important to note that my students had to write (without AI) lots of reflections as part of university assessment. So they already had the raw materials.
Professionals will need to develop these on their own.
This exercise reveals two things pretty quick:
How much you’ve actually documented. If you pull together your work and there’s almost nothing there, the results will not be good.
Whether your AI practice is coherent enough to describe what you did in detail. If you can’t prompt an AI to summarize your own workflow, you may not have a workflow yet, just a collection of habits.
Here is the assignment adapted for content professionals and educators alike.
The AI cover page exercise
For educators: This exercise works for any course where students have built some form of AI writing practice like a prompt library, style guidelines, workflow documentation, or system prompts. Honestly, I think it would work in any class where students are doing substantial work with their writing or writing process, if you are comfortable using AI in this way.
For content professionals: Treat this as a self-directed exercise. Your “portfolio” is whatever you’ve built. If you don’t have anything built, check out my course!
What you are building
Your job is to create a reflective introduction to your AI writing practice that is 400–600 words, written in your voice, generated with your tools, and revised by you.
Treat this like a cover page that introduces your AI workflow to someone reading it for the first time like a hiring manager, a potential client, a collaborator, or a future version of yourself.
It should do three things:
describe what’s in your portfolio and how it’s organized,
explain specifically what you’ve learned or built,
and situate your work in a professional context
People want to know what they can learn by examining the documentation in your portfolio.
What does your AI practice make possible that wasn’t possible before? Where does it work? Where doesn’t it work? What are some takeaways for people in your field?
How to build it
Before you open an AI tool, write a brief self-assessment in your own words. Ideally, you should also have documentation from the process itself.
What have you actually built?
What works consistently?
What’s still improvised or undocumented?
Don’t use AI for this part. The point is to do your own thinking first so the AI has something real to work with. Keep what you write, because it’s the raw material for your prompt.
Then gather the key artifacts from your AI practice:
system prompts,
style guidelines,
prompt library entries,
workflow documentation, and
testing notes.
You don’t need everything. Pick the work that best represents what you’ve built.
Upload your documents to your chosen AI. This collection is your knowledge base for the exercise.
Write a prompt asking the AI to help you draft a reflective introduction to your portfolio.
Apply everything you know about prompt design. A vague prompt produces generic output. A well-constructed prompt produces something that actually reflects your practice.
Then revise. Read the output carefully and rewrite anything that doesn’t accurately represent what you’ve built. You’re the author. The AI is a drafting tool.
Requirements
To be complete, the document must
be written in first person,
reference at least three specific tools, prompts, or workflows from your practice by name,
include at least one sentence connecting your AI practice to a specific professional goal or context, and
reflect genuine specific learning (not generic claims about productivity or efficiency).
It must not be submitted as raw AI output without meaningful revision, and it must not make claims about your work that aren’t supported by what you’ve actually built.
A note on the prompt
Paste your final prompt at the end of the document to show your readers how you generated the reflection. The prompt is part of the portfolio. It shows that you can design effective prompts that match the output you want. For educators, it’s also your window into whether a student engaged with the assignment or outsourced it.