Module 4 · Career, projects and honesty Lesson 12 of 15
Build the portfolio project: an interview research brief for one real company
Pick a company you have genuinely applied to and build a two-page, fully sourced brief: what they do, the last year of news, the competitors, the risks, and the three things you will be expected to know. It is the thing you will talk about in the interview, so it has to be small enough to finish in a fortnight and concrete enough to show a person in one minute.
The concept
Pick a company you have genuinely applied to and build a two-page, fully sourced brief: what they do, the last year of news, the competitors, the risks, and the three things you will be expected to know. Finish it before you start the next one. A half-built idea shows nothing; a small finished thing shows that you can finish.
Use the tool as a collaborator, not an author: ask it for a plan, a critique and a checklist, and write the work yourself. In the interview the questions will be about the decisions — why this, why not that — and only the work you did yourself has answers.
Write one paragraph beside the project: what problem it solves, what you used, and what you would do differently next time. That paragraph is the interview.
Worked example
Finished, it is two pages where every line has a link, plus five questions you would ask the interviewer that show you did the reading.
Your practice task
Ask a working professional in that field to read it and mark anything that is wrong or out of date. Being corrected is the fastest way to learn what a good brief is.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
Pick a company you have genuinely applied to and build a two-page, fully sourced brief: what they do, the last year of news, the competitors, the risks, and the three things you will be expected to know.
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You finished every lesson.
Your certificate is ready, and the projects you built are the proof to attach to an application.
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Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.