During the PhD · Build your proof

Your portfolio: website, GitHub, LinkedIn

A resume tells an employer what you can do. A portfolio shows them. One clean page and two or three good samples are enough.

3 min read · By Marc Sleiman

Hiring managers are trying to reduce risk. The fastest way to reduce it is to let them see your work. A portfolio does that before you ever get on a call. It does not need to be large or fancy. One clean page and two to four strong samples are enough, as long as everything is reachable in one or two clicks.

A personal website

Your website is the home base that everything else points to. Keep it simple and fast to scan, because a visitor will give it about a minute.

At the top, put your name, a professional photo, a short bio and a way to reach you. Write the bio in plain language, not in the abstract style of your dissertation. Say what kind of problems you solve and for whom. Then show two to four work samples. Each sample needs a title that states the finding, two or three sentences on the problem and the result, and a link to the full piece. Good samples include an executive-style report, a dashboard, an analysis of a real dataset or a short project summary. Your job-market paper belongs here too, but it should not be the only thing.

A clear example of a sample title: “Delivery fees above $5 cut repeat orders by 18% in mid-sized cities.” A weak one: “Pricing Analysis Project.” The first tells a busy reader why to click.

GitHub

GitHub shows that you can actually build and analyze, not just describe it. Publish clean, documented code from two or three selected projects. You do not need dozens of repositories. You need a few that a stranger can understand.

Every repository needs a README that explains the problem, the data, the approach and the result in plain language, with one chart if possible. Organize the code into folders, remove dead code and hard-coded file paths, and make sure someone else could run it. Hiring managers rarely read the code line by line. They look at whether it is organized and documented, because that tells them what working with you would be like.

LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn profile should link directly to your website and GitHub, and feature your strongest projects at the top. The LinkedIn page covers the profile in detail, along with how to use it to stay visible.

One project, several versions

The best portfolios show range. A strong portfolio does not need a completely different research project for every skill you want to demonstrate. One serious piece of analysis can be developed into several professional products, each designed for a different audience and purpose.

Suppose your research examines health insurance markets. The underlying academic work may be narrow and technically sophisticated, but the same knowledge can be translated into several forms:

1. An executive report that explains the problem, summarizes the evidence and ends with a clear business or policy recommendation. The executive summary may be one page, but the full report is longer.
2. A professional slide presentation for executives that reduces the analysis to the key facts, implications, risks and recommended actions.
3. A technical professional write-up that shows the data, code, model choices, assumptions, methods and results without looking like an academic journal article. It should be rigorous, visually polished and easy for a technically trained professional to navigate.
4. An industry or market analysis that places the narrow research question inside the broader healthcare and health insurance market. This might cover market structure, major firms, regulation, costs, growth, competition and important trends.
5. A technical presentation for a PhD or quantitative audience that presents the industry or market analysis with greater methodological depth and more attention to the underlying evidence.

Put these versions on your site and link them to one another, so an employer can move from the executive recommendation to the underlying analysis, data and methods. Taken together, they show that you can talk to a vice president in the morning and to a data team in the afternoon, which is exactly the range many employers are hiring for.

These versions demonstrate different skills without requiring five unrelated projects. They show that you can conduct rigorous analysis, understand the broader industry, communicate with technical audiences and translate evidence into decisions for executives or policymakers. That is much closer to what employers need than simply showing that you can write an academic paper. The writing page shows how to write the executive version.

Make it reachable everywhere

Put your website link in your email signature, at the top of your resume and on your brochure as a QR code. When you meet someone at a conference, they should be able to see your best work on their phone before you have finished talking.