As of 13 August 2026, AI can choose projects for your new-career portfolio.

What to actually do

1. Use a tool built for this

   The route this page recommends

2. Do it yourself

   Second choice

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open three to five current UK job adverts for the role you want and copy the relevant requirements into a document, removing personal contact details.
   2. List your existing skills, experience, completed projects, available tools, weekly time, total deadline and any budget, privacy or accessibility constraints.
   3. Paste the adverts and your list into a chatbot with the copyable prompt, then ask it to rank the five project ideas rather than accepting its first suggestion.
   4. Compare each claimed skill and evidence requirement in the ranking against the original adverts, deleting any project that depends on tools, data or time you do not have.
   5. Choose up to two projects and ask the chatbot to turn the preferred one into staged deliverables, a four-week plan and a portfolio case-study outline.
   6. Build the project, keep dated notes of your decisions and contributions, and test every link, result and factual claim before publishing the portfolio entry.
   7. Ask someone familiar with the target role to compare the finished entry with the job adverts and identify evidence that is still missing.

   Prompt

   Help me choose projects for a new-career portfolio.
   
   Target role or roles: [insert target role or roles]
   UK job adverts or person specifications: [paste three to five relevant adverts, with company names and personal contact details removed]
   Current skills: [list what I can do and my level]
   Relevant experience: [list work, study, volunteering or personal experience]
   Projects already completed: [list links or brief descriptions]
   Time available each week: [insert amount]
   Total time available before applying: [insert amount]
   Tools, data and equipment I can access: [list them]
   Topics I want to work on: [list them]
   Topics I do not want to work on: [list them]
   Constraints: [budget, privacy, accessibility, location, collaboration or other limits]
   
   Extract the recurring skills and evidence requested in the job adverts. Propose five realistic portfolio projects that can be completed within my stated time and constraints. For each project, give the problem, intended user or audience, deliverable, skills demonstrated, evidence it would create for the target role, estimated build stages, dependencies, risks and a way to show the result publicly without exposing private data. Do not invent employers, datasets, results, qualifications or tools. Mark any assumption clearly.
   
   Score each idea from 1 to 5 for relevance to the supplied adverts, feasibility, distinctiveness, evidence quality and learning value. Explain every score. Rank the ideas, recommend the best two, and state what evidence would make me reject each recommendation. Finish with a four-week plan for the first project and a checklist for verifying that the finished portfolio entry contains accurate claims, a working demonstration or suitable substitute, and a clear explanation of my contribution.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.