Community Contribution #6

A recent learning experience was using Canva to create a personal marketing portfolio to showcase my skills and experience for future career opportunities. Through this process, I used Canva to organize my marketing experience, highlight previous projects, and create a portfolio that reflects my career interests. I have used Canva before, but it was interesting to reflect on the process, specifically looking at autonomy, competency, and relatedness.

Canva supported my autonomy because I had control over the design and direction of my portfolio. Rather than following a strict template, I used a template to start off but altered it throughout the process. This allowed me to showcase my different experiences while having creative freedom; this creative freedom allowed me to have ownership over my learning.

Creating my portfolio helped me become more confident in digital design; this is something that I have wanted to do for a while, so completing it after hours of consideration made me feel competent. I had to think critically about how to organize my work and communicate my skills effectively to potential employers. In addition, I worked through two other platforms before deciding on Canva, which took time to figure out. As I experimented with Canva’s features, I gained more experience with different tools/features that I can apply to other marketing roles.

Relatedness was not as prevalent in this experience as I worked on my portfolio individually. However, this portfolio was intended to help me connect with potential employers, so showcasing my work could communicate my interests and experience to people in my industry.

Overall, this experience showed me that Canva can support autonomy and competency by allowing learners to create something personal where they can gain confidence in doing so. The process of working through something and feeling accomplished with the result makes you gain a sense of competency.