Turn your course outputs into portfolio pieces and choose the next course or skill for your chosen role.
Get out your course outputs and put them where you can see them all: the marketing audit, the customer journey map, the positioning statement, the tested value proposition, the channel scorecard, the budget sheet and the one-page plan. You'll pick two of them, write a short note on each, and then choose the course or skill to study next. Allow about thirty minutes.
Most applicants for marketing jobs list the same things: social media, Canva, Google Analytics and "strong communication skills". If a hiring manager has forty CVs like that on the desk, they can't tell which candidates can actually think. Anyone can claim a tool skill, and a CV gives the reader no way to check it. A candidate who attaches a one-page marketing plan, with the numbers behind it and a note on what went wrong, stands out from that pile and gets remembered.
You already have this kind of material from the course. A plan, a tested value proposition or a journey map shows that you can work out who a business is for, what to say to them and how to measure the result. A portfolio piece is one of those outputs, chosen and written up so a hiring manager can see how you think.
The pieces that work best usually have three features. They come from a real business with real customers. They include something you tested or measured, such as the five-person value proposition test or the first month's numbers from your one-page plan. And they show something that changed because of what you found out.
Then match the pieces to the role you picked in Lesson 8.1. If you're aiming at a performance role, use the budget sheet with the lifetime value and acquisition cost sums. For a content and copy role, show your value proposition as it was before the five conversations and as it was after them. For a product marketing role, use the positioning statement, and for a generalist role, use the one-page plan.
The two you're proudest of may not be the two that show the most thinking. Pick pieces where you can explain every decision you made.
You don't need paid clients. Work on your own side business, a family business, a friend's shop or a volunteer project all counts, as long as you say which it was. Write the context plainly, for example "a family-run hawker stall, unpaid" or "a volunteer project for a community tuition programme", so nobody reading it assumes you were paid by a client.
Hiring managers know that junior candidates often haven't had paid clients yet, and they're mainly looking at how you approached the problem. A clear label makes them more likely to trust the rest of what you've written. If you make the work sound bigger than it was and an interviewer asks you about it, you'll lose far more than an honest label would ever have cost you.
Ask the business owner before you share anything. Take out customer names, phone numbers and any figures the owner would prefer to keep private. If the owner doesn't want real revenue shown, use percentages or round numbers instead and note that you've changed them.
A case note is a short write-up of one piece of work, usually under 300 words, that a stranger can read in two minutes. It has three parts.
The first part is the problem: what the business was trying to fix, in one or two sentences, with the customer named. The second is what you did: the steps you took, the decisions you made, one option you considered and rejected, and the piece itself attached. Including the rejected option lets the reader see that you compared choices before settling on one. The third part is what you learned: what the work showed you, and what surprised you or went wrong. Interviewers often ask about this part, because it shows your judgement.
Jun is a junior marketing executive who wants to move into performance marketing. He did the course using his mother's chicken rice stall in a Bedok food centre. In his problem statement he explains that the stall depended on walk-in lunch customers and had no way to reach office workers nearby who wanted to pre-order, and that weekday lunch sales had been flat for a year.
For what he did, Jun mapped the journey for one customer type: office workers within a ten-minute walk. He found that these people already knew the stall, and that the biggest gap was the lack of an easy way to order ahead. He scored five channels. He chose a Google Business Profile with a pre-order link to bring in new customers and a WhatsApp broadcast to keep regulars coming back. He set a goal of 15 pre-orders a day by the end of the quarter, a budget of S$150 a month (example figures), and stop rules for a small ad test.
For what he learned, Jun wrote that the ad test got clicks but almost no pre-orders, so he stopped it in week four as his stop rule required. The WhatsApp broadcast to regulars worked better than he had expected, and if he ran the plan again he would start the broadcast list on day one. The note describes the work as unpaid, for a family business.
His second case note is about his budget sheet and the lifetime value sum behind it, since that is the piece closest to the performance role he wants.
This course covers the whole plan. Each sibling course takes one part of the plan and covers it in more depth:
Content and copywriting that people read SEO and AI search Social media and short-form video Paid ads: Meta, Google and TikTok Email marketing and automation Marketing analytics: GA4, attribution and testing
Choose the course or skill that matches the role you're aiming for. Jun picked Paid ads: Meta, Google and TikTok, to fit his move into performance marketing. For courses outside MoneyBees, you can use SkillsFuture Credit if the course is eligible. Some courses don't qualify, so look up the specific course on the SkillsFuture website before you sign up.
Open your course outputs now and lay them side by side before you choose. The two pieces you're proudest of are not always the two that show the most thinking, so pick the ones where you can explain every decision.
Write two portfolio case notes from your course work and name the sibling course you will take next for your chosen role.
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