MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEER PORTFOLIO

Audio: Mechanical design engineer portfolio

Landing a great job in a great company can sometimes be challenging. Usually, great companies have many applicants for a single job vacancy. So the question is, of course, how to stand out from all other candidates that applied? In addition to a great CV and cover letter, I found that the mechanical design portfolio is beneficial in correctly presenting all of your skills.

I firmly believe that my mechanical design portfolio was directly responsible for landing the most significant job up to that point in my career (Fortune 500 company). In this article, I would like to share why you should have your own mechanical design portfolio and how you could create it to stand out from the “crowd. “

Why is it important to have a mechanical design portfolio?

You probably heard about the term “portfolio “before. The Cambridge Dictionary defines this term as: “a collection of drawings, documents, etc., that represent a person’s, especially an artist’s, work. ” Usually, this is associated with photographers, painters, industrial designers, etc. However, I believe mechanical design engineering is a form of art mixed with science.

Let us say that you are developing a new product. You initially receive a product requirement specification document; from the words on the paper, you start working on different concepts and ideas. Finally, a few months or years later, you have a finished product. You are solving various technical problems, using all of your creative capacity and technical knowledge to do so. Look at the cars we drive each day; cars are art and science on four wheels. The products, just like art, evoke an emotional response in people.

For this reason, I feel like the standard CV and cover letter are not representing mechanical design engineer skills completely. If you love what you are doing and if you take pride in what you are doing, you should give it an appropriate platform to show it. I found that this platform, when applying to different jobs or just letting people know who you are as a professional, is a “mechanical design portfolio. “

Furthermore, having a mechanical design portfolio will definitely make you stand out from others that do not have it. It will show that you spent time preparing this document and taking your job application more seriously. Furthermore, if you go the additional mile, it could be, in addition to your awesome projects, another testament to your creativity and diligence.

Another perspective you could look into is that every company hiring people is trying to sell itself as the best option for you out there. They are investing heavily in attracting the top talents into their teams. Usually, they would have different ways of promoting themselves, like learn about our team, life at our company, the impact that you will make, what we offer, benefits and more, etc.

So, if the companies are communicating the message that they are the best option out there, why would you not do the same?

How did the mechanical design portfolio help me?

I have a master’s degree in product design and development. After I finished my studies, I was extremely excited to start working in this field. However, after my studies, real life happened, like it happens to many students that are stepping into the realm of independence; I took the first job I could get (in the meantime, my business failed). I ended up working as a mechanical design engineer, but I was designing pipeline support constructions. This was not really what I had in my mind when I said I wanted to work as a mechanical design engineer.

After working for almost three years, I knew that I must change something if I wanted to work the job I would like. So, I found a different job that was going more in that direction. It was still not the job I wanted to have, but it went in that direction. After just two months, life happened, and I quit my job. I packed all my stuff, and I moved from Croatia to Germany.

I did not speak the German language, and I had no connections there. My wife and I invested all our savings into this venture. When I arrived in Germany, I went from company to company, serving them personally with my CV. I connected with anyone who could help me. In addition, I applied every day for online job vacancies. Long story short, in the period of two months, I received more than 200 rejections.

During this process, I kept thinking about how I could stand out and get to the point where I just had the opportunity to start working and prove my worth. That was when I got to the idea of creating a mechanical design portfolio where I included all of the projects related to mechanical design engineering. And I managed to land a job, and I landed a big one. I remember that in my last interview, I was presenting my portfolio to a team of people that later became my work colleagues.

In addition to my portfolio, the preparation work I did for the interview also played a significant role in getting a job in Fortune 500 company, but more about this in another article.

This job changed my life. My financial canvas was almost immediately fixed, and the learning curve on this job was insane. I spend countless hours at home learning about product design. It led me to understand how deep your knowledge has to be if you want to become an expert mechanical design engineer, and it only deepened my passion for this field. This job financed the beginning of the Newtonian world. I personally believe that my mechanical design portfolio played a considerable role in getting this job.

By this time, I hope that I have convinced you that spending some time creating your own portfolio will help you stand out and possibly help you get your dream job.

What projects should you put into your mechanical design portfolio?

I would say that you should start by understanding why you are creating your mechanical design portfolio. Are you applying to a specific job vacancy, or do you want to create your portfolio and share it on different platforms to represent yourself?

Let us now look into both options separately:

Specific job vacancy mechanical design portfolio

If you are applying for a specific job vacancy, you should emphasize the projects closely related to the job vacancy requirements.

For example, suppose the job requirement is to have experience working with Autodesk Fusion 360. In that case, you will include the project that you did in that specific software and share as many details as needed to prove your expertise in using this software.

Furthermore, you will either remove or use projects unrelated to this particular software to demonstrate your general knowledge, understanding, and logic behind CAD modeling. Or you will use those same projects to emphasize other skills and requirements stated in the job vacancy.

You want to ensure that your mechanical design portfolio (and your CV) do not confuse the person looking into your documents. Do not jump around, proving that you are this human machine that knows everything and that there is nothing you cannot do.

Most people are well aware of the saying: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” (not many people know that it actually goes: “jack-of-all-trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”). With this being said, you want to ensure that you do not come across as a “master of none.” You should keep your portfolio and CV harmonized and represent yourself as a person that is an ideal candidate for this specific role.

General mechanical design portfolio

If you are not looking for a new job but still want to share your skills and create your own personal brand, you should start with a question: what is the message that I want to convey about myself to others?

Before I started with the Newtonian world, I always said that I knew that I am a good mechanical design engineer; the problem is that others do not know that.

Think hard about how you want to represent yourself and then align your mechanical design portfolio like that. If you want to be known in the automotive industry, you should include those projects. If you want to be known as an expert in CAD modeling with specific software, do the same. Like everything else on your public profile, your portfolio will speak about you even when you are not talking.

How should you structure your mechanical design portfolio?

When I was making my first mechanical design portfolio, I did a pretty good job of structuring my portfolio, but the portfolio’s design was a completely different story. Now when I think about it, and I was thinking a lot about this, I believe that your mechanical design portfolio should be both structured and designed well.

As a mechanical design engineer, you should be very creative and, at the same time, technically vocational. You create a new product (devices, mechanisms, fixtures, jigs, etc.), usually from scratch. There is a lot of creativity and creative problem-solving involved, and, in the end, your solutions should be technically feasible. This is the most exciting part of being a mechanical design engineer; you should be creative enough to create new solutions and organized and technical enough to call yourself an engineer.

This creative/organized entanglement should also be visible in your mechanical design portfolio. The creative part you will show with the design of your portfolio, and the organized and technical part you will show with the clear portfolio structure. And hopefully, your projects will show both. The idea behind this is to show an example of this creative/organized entanglement in one document.

I would not suggest you immediately jump into the projects, but I would start with:

Cover slide/page,
About me,
Content,
Projects, publications, etc.

Cover slide/page

A cover slide or cover page is the first thing anyone will see when they open your mechanical design portfolio. Immediately when you see the cover slide, you want to know what this document is all about. From the picture below, you can immediately understand what the document is about: Matej Mandić’s mechanical design portfolio.

I suggest you write the “mechanical design portfolio” on the cover page. Usually, engineers do not have a portfolio, and this could intrigue the person that is reading this.

About me slide/page

or your CV. I suggest you keep it short, write a few sentences, and include your picture and preferred contact method. You can also include a quote that resonates with you and that you think would resonate with the people reading your portfolio.

You can see the “About me” page from my portfolio in the picture below. As you can see, I kept it really short. I intentionally included the word “CV.” In case they missed it, I wanted to remind them that another document was shared with them.

Content slide/page

You should include the content of the mechanical design portfolio with the corresponding slide/page number. First of all, whoever is reading this will get a quick overview of the projects, and in case something is interesting to them, they can immediately jump to that slide/page.

Projects, publications, etc. slide/page

Now we are getting to the main part of the mechanical design portfolio. I created it in a way that I wrote the name of the project, its duration, the software that I used, and a short description of the project. All this was followed up with pictures that I found interesting for this project.

If you have any publications and want to show them, I would suggest starting with the name of the publication, listing the authors, where it was published, abstract, keywords, and I would finish with the used equipment and software.

Of course, the beauty of creating your own mechanical design portfolio is that you can design it and structure it as you wish, these are only suggestions, and you can use them as a starting point.

When saving the portfolio, name it: “Mechanical design portfolio – First name Last name.” In that way, you will ensure that when someone opens your e-mail, your “Mechanical design portfolio” pops out immediately.

I would like to point out one more thing; in case you have some projects that you did for the company you are working for or worked for, I would suggest you send an e-mail to your supervisor and ask for permission to publish this information in your portfolio. This is because most companies bind their employees with NDA (non-disclosure agreement), and they could sue you for publicly sharing the company’s info. So, for example, the bad idea is to write: “I helped to achieve a revenue target of 25M€.” It would be better to write: “I helped to achieve a high revenue target (exact number subtracted due to the NDA).”

What tools could you use to create a mechanical design portfolio?

Basically, you can use any tool you want as long as you can get the desired outcome. I personally created my first portfolio in Microsoft Word; the second time, I used Canva Pro, which comes with the tone of design ideas and a library of free pictures. You could also use Microsoft Publisher or PowerPoint.

I would say that there are a lot of possibilities; just make sure that the software you are using can export it in pdf file format.

Another thing that you can do when creating a general mechanical design portfolio is to create your own website where the domain will be your first and last name. If you finished mechanical engineering or are currently studying it, learning how to build a website should not be a problem for you. It is just a matter of investing enough time.

You do not have to become a master in website design for you to have a functional and presentable website. The Newtonian World website, with articles, blog posts, a shop, downloadables, a newsletter, etc., has been created by me. I had zero knowledge of website design, and I managed to learn it. So, you can do it too.

Closing words

The mechanical design portfolio is not exactly a “thing” when mechanical design engineers apply for different jobs. Everything I wrote here is based on my opinions, reflections, and experiences. In today’s job market, if you want to land a good job, you must stand out from the other candidates. And that is exactly what a mechanical design portfolio will help you with.

I would strongly encourage you to reach out to us in the comments or via e-mail if you have any other experiences, thoughts, or suggestions. If you have a friend that is a person recruiting for similar positions, share with them and share their feedback with us. Give us your thoughts so that we can together make this guideline more useful for other mechanical design engineers.

Do you like what you read? Then, share it with your friends, colleagues, and on your social media channels. And if you want to become a part of the Newtonians, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter!