Adding Work Experience/Family Service to your Portfolio

Work Experience can earn you micro-scholarships from colleges just like courses and activities do.

In this article

• What counts as work experience?
• How to add work experience to your Portfolio
• How do colleges award work experience?
• How to delete work experience

What counts as work experience or family service? What's the difference?

Work experience could be a few things: time spent getting paid for a skill or service, or time spent helping your family even if you were not paid.

As always with everything else on your Portfolio, though, only include work experience that you did during 9th-12th grade or community college. 

How to add work experience

Under the Work Experience section, click "Add."

1. What was your title? Could be a title, like "pizza delivery person," or could be a description: "I took care of my siblings while my parents were at work."
2. Where did you work? Can be anything- "Main St. Bakery," "at home," "family store," etc.
3. Date Range: Between which dates did you work? For example from June 30th until September 4th. You can also select "I currently work here" to indicate that you are still in that position. Once your time in that role end, you can updated your "End Date".
4. Time Commitment: how many hours did you work each week? 
5. Describe your responsibilities: Give some details about what you did! 
6. Did you get paid? If yes, check the box "This work experience was paid"
7. Did you do this to help support your family? For example, if you got paid and used that money to help your family if you saved your family money by babysitting or doing other work around the house/at a family business, or in any other way helped your family financially, you should check "I worked here to help support my family". If you worked a non-family job for spending money, even if the money went into savings for college, please check "This work experience was paid".

How do colleges award work experience?

As with anything on your Portfolio, like courses or activities, colleges may or may not offer micro-scholarships for work experience.

Those that do may choose to offer scholarships for specific types of work experience or might put a maximum on how much you can earn for work experience. 

As with all micro-scholarships, log in and go to a college's page and click "Your Scholarships" to see what they offer!

How to delete work experience

1. Click on the work experience card to edit it.
2. Click "delete" in the very bottom left corner and confirm that you want to remove it from your Portfolio.