When it comes to launching or accelerating your data career, skills and certifications alone just won't cut it.

To set yourself apart from the crowd and showcase your analytical skills, nothing beats a high-quality project portfolio.

In this article, we'll walk through how to build and host your own project portfolio on the Maven Analytics platform and share some tips and best practices for creating eye-catching portfolios.

To get started with a new project, follow these steps:

On the Portfolio Project page, you'll find the following sections:

Use the Basic information tab to add a project title, featured image, excerpt, and description:

The project title and excerpt will be displayed on the project cards in your profile, so it’s important to make them clear, concise, and descriptive enough to draw viewers in.

The featured image should provide a single, clear visual representation of your project (don't worry, you can add supporting images or embedded media as well).

Here are a few examples of projects in my profile:

The title and featured image are also displayed on the Project Showcase page:

The description is displayed on the project detail page, and should guide the viewer through your thought process and analytical approach.

A good project description (ideally) answers these three questions:

Here's an example from my "Hotel Booking Optimization" project:

And this is the featured image, which is a screenshot of my dashboard:

The Tools & Data tab lets you select the technical tools or programming languages you used to conduct the analysis for the project. You can also associate your project with a dataset from our Data Playground, or include a link to your own external data source:

The Additional images tab allows you to include complementary images or GIFs to provide more detail or highlight different components of your analysis.

For example, you could include screenshots or images of:

Once you upload an additional image, you can click on the pencil icon to add a caption and describe what the image represents.

The Embed media tab allows you to display fully functional Power BI, Tableau or Excel Online dashboards on your project page, which viewers can interact with directly.

If you didn't use these tools, you can also embed a YouTube or Vimeo link to showcase the dashboard functionality or provide a video walkthrough of the project. You can also customize the aspect ratio to support common report layouts.

If you are having difficulty with embedded media, check out our in-depth troubleshooting guide.

If you are uploading a project as part of a Maven Challenge, you can select the challenge to submit your entry. This will add your project to the official challenge gallery, and ensure that your submission is eligible for the contest.

Last but not least, the Preferences tab includes options to include your work in a team showcase (if you are on a team or enterprise plan), allow commenting, or display the number of likes on your project page.

Once you've finished adding your project details, you can click View project to see a preview, or select Publish from the dropdown menu to update your project from Draft to Published - please note that publishing a project is a mandatory step if you want your project to be publically visible.

When you publish a project, it will be added to the public Project Showcase page, as well as your personal profile.

Last but not least, don't forget to share! Simply click the Share button on your profile (or an individual project page), and use the link provided to showcase your work to peers and potential employers around the world.

Ready to get started? Click the link below to start building your first project!

Not finding what you need? Reach out or send us a chat – we'd be happy to help!