Artificial intelligence is among the most sought after careers in the current world and age, given the bright future prospects of the said disruptive tech. But, building a promising career in the same requires one to create a portfolio that showcase their skills in the best light. Seeking an AI job without a portfolio at hand is similar to boarding a flight with no passport in possession.
Building a good portfolio is considered the first step to getting hired as an AI engineer at any technology firm in the world. It helps to build your personal brand to market yourself in the AI community, and the global job markets. For networking purposes too, it’s the portfolio that gets asked about first.
What To Put In the Portfolio When You Have No Experience?
If you want more recruiters to call you regarding AI job interviews, when you have no prior work experience to boast of, you can showcase the diverse projects you have worked on till date. They doesn’t ought to be paid work.
To build a path towards your prospective AI career, you will have to showcase some kind of technical competency of your AI skills. Even the experienced AI professionals maintain their portfolio, and update it from time-to-time to keep it relevant over a duration of years.
What Does the Future Hold for AI’s Deployment across Industries?
- AI worldwide market is predicted to rise to a whopping $190 billion by 2025, as per the research conducted by Markets and Markets.
- As per IDC, the global investments on AI & Cognitive systems will soar to an impressive $57.6 billion by 2021.
- IDC research also concluded that 40% of the digital transformation innovations will leverage AI.
- The same study brought before us an eye-opening fact, that says, 75% of corporate enterprise applications will make use of AI by 2021.
- China is supposed to be making the most of AI in terms of leveraging its business benefits. By 2030, China will become the biggest beneficiary of AI, with North America following her.
Most in-demand AI talents across organizations in the US in 2018
Source:Statista
Building a Promising AI Portfolio
The Format
The portfolio can be built across two major formats: GitHub, or in the form of a personal blog, or a website. A GitHub profile or a personal blog would prove to be a great platform to showcase your ML coding skills, or your prowess at working on varied kind of algorithm-building software, or tool.
Besides, penning down a blog on a topic of interest in AI can work as a great testimony of your abilities as a prospective AI specialist. In your blogs, you can write about the projects you have worked, and the related personal experience of working on them. Project presentations can be showcased in a brief manner, or one can talk about his experience of dealing with an AI-building software tool, that he leveraged, while hustling with his projects.
What Projects to Choose While Building an Apt Portfolio?
A model portfolio would enlist a collection of diverse AI projects that you have taken up till date. Or, if you have not, start building your portfolio while keeping in mind the company you are targeting to get an opportunity into. Because, then you will need to pick up projects based on what your target company does, specifically.
Tips to Gaining New AI Skills: For picking up new skills in AI-development, one can always go online to enrol in a skill-specific credentialing program. The best AI certifications for you, would be those, that will help you cultivate skills that are in sync with your career prospects.
Okay, coming back to choosing projects to include in your prospective AI portfolio, remember that, no one can become an expert at every aspect related to AI-development. And therefore, try working on projects that will lead to getting you a job, or at least an internship opportunity, at your dream company.
The Projects You Undertake Must Explore the Provided Aspects:
- Varied features of a machine learning tool, or library.
- The response of the ML algorithm under varied conditions.
- Must include an end-to-end incorporation of the ML algorithm in one of your preferred coding languages.
Portfolio Add-Ons
While including a list of AI projects you have worked on is enough for getting a job opportunity in the AI domain, but adding something extra in context of showcasing your keen interest in the field would be wonderful. Something like links to your answered questions on Quora related to AI, or the proof of your participation in AI competitions, or your talks on a respected forum, meetup, or portal, all would turn the tide in your favor.
Do consider mentioning such kind of interesting and ‘good-to-know’ personality traits in your prospective portfolio.
