Portfolio or CV: what belongs on one and never on the other

These two documents get treated as the same object in two formats. They are not. They have different jobs, different readers and different failure modes, and once you see the split, decisions about what to include stop being agonising.

A CV exists to win a meeting. It is a compressed argument, read in under a minute, usually by somebody who is not the person you would work for. Its enemy is length.

A portfolio exists to win the argument inside that meeting. It is opened deliberately, often after the CV has done its job, by somebody who already suspects you can do the work and wants to check. Its enemy is vagueness.

Belongs on the CV only

• Dates and employment history. Gaps, tenure and progression are what a screener checks. A portfolio that lists dates for every project starts to look like a badly formatted CV.
• Education, certifications, licences. Necessary, dull, and nobody browses them for pleasure.
• Salary-relevant scope: team size, budget owned, region covered, reporting line.
• Contact details in plain text, because a parser has to read them.
• The compressed claim: four to six lines per role, results-first.

Belongs on the portfolio only

• The work itself. Screens, spreads, photographs, code, the recording, the deck, the drawing set.
• Process. The version you rejected and why. This is the single most underused element of any portfolio, and it is the one that separates a professional from someone with good taste.
• Constraints. Two weeks, no budget, a client who changed the brief twice. Constraints make good work look harder, which is what it was.
• Long-form case studies. Brief, constraint, options, decision, result, what you would change.
• Testimonials with a name and a company. An anonymous quote is worth nothing; everyone assumes you wrote it.
• Things with no CV line: the side project, the open-source contribution, the volunteer redesign, the piece you made for yourself.

Belongs on both, phrased differently

Your headline claim appears in both places, compressed on the CV and expanded in the portfolio. On the CV: "Redesigned the checkout flow; card failures fell from 9% to 2.4%." In the portfolio, that becomes a page: what the old flow did, the three failure modes in the payment gateway, the two designs tested, the numbers before and after, and the one thing that did not work.

Who actually needs a portfolio

Designers, developers, writers, photographers, architects, video editors and anyone freelancing: yes, and the absence of one is itself a signal. Marketers, product managers, and consultants: increasingly yes, in the form of two or three written case studies rather than images. Accountants, HR, operations, sales, logistics: usually no — but a single public profile page that holds your CV, a short bio, your certifications and a contact button is still worth having, because it gives you one link to put in a message instead of an attachment nobody opens on a phone.

Five portfolio mistakes I see constantly

1. Everything you have ever made. Forty pieces means the reviewer sees your average, not your best. Six pieces means they see your ceiling. Cut ruthlessly, and lead with the strongest.
2. Images with no words. A grid of pretty screens tells me you can produce a pretty screen. It does not tell me whether you chose it, whether it worked, or whether you were told exactly what to draw.
3. No result. Even one number rescues a case study: 30% faster, 12,000 users, sold out in a week, approved first time by the client.
4. Client work you cannot show. NDAs are real. Describe the shape of the problem and the result without naming the client, or rebuild a sanitised version. Silence is worse than a redacted case.
5. A dead contact route. If the only way to reach you is a form that emails an address you stopped checking in 2023, everything above it was wasted.

How they should link

One line at the top of the CV, next to your email: your portfolio URL, written out, short, and memorable. Not a shortened link — those get stripped by mail filters and look temporary. If your portfolio lives on your own name, that URL is doing brand work every time it appears.

Going the other way, your portfolio should offer the CV as a download in one click, and the file behind it should be current. A stale PDF on an otherwise sharp portfolio is the most common self-inflicted wound in this entire process. Keeping both generated from the same profile is the only reliable way I know to stop that happening.

The CV gets you the room. The portfolio is what you talk about once you are in it. Make each one good at its own job and stop asking either to do both.