Profile page on UNI: How to get started and the top 5 things you need to know.

As designers in the modern world, maintaining our professional profiles on the web has become a new norm. When it comes to creative professionals, the resumé/biodata/profile is a part of the whole. This is because ‘creators’ also need to showcase their ‘Creations’. These creations, however, may come in various forms, like images, PDFs, videos, or anything else. To share these different forms, designers need to use multiple online platforms. As a result, this causes our information to be split across different platforms offering different functions.

Another thing that designers need, beyond profile-building and work-sharing, is networking. Along with popular social-networking media like Facebook and Instagram, there are some great professional-networking platforms too, like LinkedIn. Indeed, they allow you to build detailed profiles within a vastly eclectic professional community. Eventually, these profiles also need to be connected with other platforms where our works are, causing viewers to jump from place to place to access our varied information. All in all, this resultant scattering of your online presence is something that UNI is trying to minimize in the long run. The Profile page at UNI is an effort towards providing a dedicated and UNIfied space to cater to the unique needs of the creative industry.

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Why does the Profile builder at UNI exist?

To avoid scattering, you may create a personal website. But when it comes to networking, even a website doesn’t suffice on its own. It will eventually be linked to other platforms, which are again linked to each other. This fragmentation often hinders a holistic introduction of yourself to the world. UNI’s Profile builder is designed to begin addressing the scattering problem and the diverse needs of designers today.

Presently, there is an absence of a dedicated platform for architects and designers to fulfil all the above-discussed needs. In that case, UNI tries to provide you with a single venue exclusively for all these diverse activities and more. By building a Profile at UNI, you can create your own space to store your bio and build your portfolio, while also utilizing the networking aspect.

What is the Profile page like?

Your UNI Profile page is an all-encompassing place to record your details like work experience, achievements, skills, education, and all sorts of information necessary to introduce you professionally.

It brings together all the components of traditional forms like a CV and a portfolio. It can keep different mediums of your work together, like projects, competitions, multimedia journals, blogs, articles, and publications, which a portfolio alone cannot contain. Besides, its advantage over a CV and a portfolio is that it is relatively much easier to update as and when required.

A guide to building your Profile

Almost every essential you need to share about yourself professionally, can be included in your Profile. The Profile page is intentionally designed in a way familiar to most users, to provide a level of user comfort. Following are the sections provided to store your information:

•  About

In this section, you can introduce yourself with a short summary. You may mention anything you would like to let people know about you that isn’t being conveyed through any other means.

•  Experience

As customary, you can add the list of your professional experiences. This may include jobs, internships, voluntary work, freelance work, or any other form of work experience. If you are listing employment, you can mention the organization you worked with, the duration, your role, and any additional information you may want to share.

•  Education

You can list your qualifications here. Any level of education, whether a degree, diploma, or certificate course. Even if you belong to a different educational background, and are a self-taught designer, your work experience, skills and achievements can vouch for you.

•  Achievements

This is an opportunity to show your accomplishments. Under ‘achievements’ you can add a variety of accomplishments. This can be any registrations and licenses you may possess, honours and awards received, workshops you participated in, any patent by your name, or any form of recognition you may have received, including for social work. This section will certainly vary for everyone, but we would suggest you fill it to the best of your capacity, as it can be one of the agents to create interactions.

•  Skills

List the relevant creative and professional skills you have along with your proficiency level. Creative software, physical skills, programming skills, etc. You can surely mention any additional skills you may have acquired through training.

•  Link

Your current content and social profiles on other platforms can be linked with your profile page. Adding these links is also a way of completing your Profile section. You can make use of this feature to connect a vast variety of content with your profile at UNI. It can be anything from videos, blogs, podcasts, articles, illustrations, images, and, of course, social media accounts. You can select from the extensive list that will appear.

 

•  Languages

You can enter the languages you speak along with your proficiency level under the Languages section. Please note that this implies communicative languages. If it does not appear in the list, you can add it by clicking the +Add option in the dropdown list that will appear as you type. You can make changes or delete an entry later by editing. Note: It does not include Programming languages such as C, C++, which would come under the Skills section.

 

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What are the special features of your Profile at UNI?

•  Co-existence with other forms of content

1. The competitions you participate in at UNI automatically appear under your Competitions feed.

2. Your Projects page is a separate section to present your work. Here, your online design portfolio can be built and evolved over time, without a fuss.

3. Other formats of your work like image + text-based documents, multimedia reports, etc. can be stored under the Journals tab.

4. Lastly, the Publications tab is a dedicated space to share your discursive work like research, reports, essays, blogs and articles, project guidelines, handbooks, and other textual documents.

•  Information privacy

You get the added convenience of being able to update your info for your personal record. If you are not confident about putting some information out there just yet, you have the option of logging it in your profile section and keeping it private. Whenever you feel ready, you can edit your profile and make any sections visible to others by simply ticking a checkbox. Except for your profile summary, you will have the visibility choosing option in all other sections.

•  Pushing your profile discovery 

Your profile at UNI features something called a Profile Score. This is a numeric value that you can see at the top right of your Profile page. When you create an account, your default score will be zero. As you add your details, you will be assigned a corresponding profile score. The more complete and detailed your profile, the better your profile score; and the better your profile score, the higher your chances of discovery. The profile score also depends on the projects, journals, and publications you share publicly.

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What is the purpose of the profile score?

The Profile score is a means of building a reputation at UNI. Having a good profile score helps you rank higher on various places at the platform, assisting your appearance and discovery. Similarly, we believe that having a detailed profile may also help a member's credibility in a new community. For example, when you participate in discussions or comment on a project, your views are likely to be valued more, since your detailed profile suggests that you are a real person actively contributing to the community.

In a way, having the profile score is also intended to help us moderate the community and take measures to restrict spamming on the platform from dubious accounts with no information.

A side benefit of having a complete profile (apart from a great profile score) is the ability to introduce yourself better to fellow creators. This may even lead to encouraging interactions within UNI’s creative community.

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The diverse but unified Profile at UNI is for everyone to utilize the way it suits them best. It is for anyone—from professionals with a notable list of achievements, to those in the process of building their careers, those moving ahead, and those needing a kick-start. Your profile can become an ice-breaker and connect with like-minded professionals; potentially leading to great discussions, productive associations, and valuable learning.

Do give the UNI Profile builder a try, and please share with us your ideas on how it can serve you better!