In this instructional video, Kedeisha Bryan critiques the common advice for data‑analytics job seekers to host their portfolios on GitHub, arguing that the format creates a barrier for non‑technical recruiters and hiring managers who typically have only seconds to evaluate an application. She introduces the "3 E's" framework—easy to access, easy to navigate, and easy to consume—as the essential criteria for an effective portfolio. Demonstrating how GitHub fails each of these criteria, she proposes using Canva, a free, no‑code design tool that can publish a one‑page visual website with an instant URL. Bryan explains how Canva satisfies the 3 E's, allows linking to deeper GitHub repositories for those who want to dive in, and can be built in about 30 minutes. She concludes with a call‑to‑action: pick a Canva template, add project cards that clearly state the business question, key insights, and recommendations, publish the site, and share it on LinkedIn, while also directing viewers to a follow‑up video for project examples.
Chapters
Every data career channel is telling you to put your portfolio on GitHub. And today I'm going to show you why that advice is the reason hiring managers are closing your portfolio in under 10 seconds and what I switched to instead that takes 80% less time to build, costs nothing to host, and actually gets interviews. Because the problem with your portfolio was never the projects, it was the format. And nobody told you that because everyone in this space is building portfolios the way developers do. You are not a developer, you're a data analyst, and the person reviewing your work is also not technical. If this is your first time here, I'm Kedeisha. And I have helped thousands of other career changers build portfolios that actually land interviews. And I only figured out what I'm about to show you because I spent months doing it the wrong way first. My early portfolios were GitHub repos, and every single update was a fight with the markdown file structures and formatting that had nothing to do with data analytics. I was spending more time maintaining the container than building the actual work inside of it. And that is when I realized that the entire approach was broken. All right. So let me tell you something most people in this space never talk about. And it is the single most important thing about your portfolio. Portfolio. The people reviewing your portfolio, they are not data engineers. They are not scrolling through GitHub repos for fun. In most companies, the first person who sees your application is a recruiter or hiring manager who has hundreds of other applications sitting in the same queue. They are going to spend at most maybe 30 seconds deciding whether your portfolio is worth even looking at. 30 seconds. Now think about what happens when they click on your GitHub link. They land on a page full of file names, random file names. Maybe they see a README if you wrote one, or the default README that has nothing in there. Maybe they They see a list of randomly named folders, Project 1, Project 2, underscore, whatever. There's no visual hierarchy, there's no narrative, there's no way for a non-technical person to understand what you did, why it mattered, or what the business outcome was without clicking into files, scrolling through code, and doing cognitive work that they do not have time to do. So what do they do? They close the tab and they move on to the next candidate, and your work, which may have been excellent, never got seen. Not because it wasn't good enough, but because they literally couldn't get to it. I talked people every single week who are in this exact situation. They have all the projects, they put in the real work, and they're not getting callbacks. Why is that? One person I know said it perfectly. You could tell me to build a portfolio, but if I don't know how to build it, you're just telling me words. She had the skills, she had the projects. What she didn't have was a format that made her work accessible to the person evaluating it. And she's not alone. I hear this constantly. Hey, I've been applying for months. I have a portfolio, but nothing's happening. And when I look at the portfolio, the first thing I see is this unorganized GitHub repo that requires technical fluency just to navigate it. That is a barrier between your work and your offer, and you built it yourself without even knowing it. So most advice in this space focuses on what projects to build, and that matters, of course. I have talked about that extensively on my channel, but almost no one talks about how to present those projects, and the how is what determines whether anyone even looks. Think about it from the hiring manager's perspective. You got 2 candidates, same level of work, same type of One of them sends a GitHub link with 6 repositories and a README that is completely blank. And the other person sends a clean visual one-pager site where every project has a title, a business question, and a visual. You don't even have to click anywhere. Everything is on it. You just have to scroll through it. There's no login, no clicking through file trees, and no password protection. Which one do you think gets reviewed? Which one do you even think gets remembered? It's not even close. And the person who built the better projects but put them in the worst format just lost to someone who may have been less skilled but was easier to evaluate. Think about your favorite supermarket. Mine is Kroger. If a new Kroger was being built in my city, but the outside looked like a prison, I'm not going in there. And no one else is either because the outside looks like a prison and it's not a prison inside. It's an actual supermarket. But how are we supposed to know that? Same thing with putting your portfolio in an unorganized GitHub. Your portfolio is a product. And just like any product, if the user experience is bad and nobody cares how good the underlying technology is, they already left. So after months of fighting with GitHub on my weekends, updating Markdown files, fixing these broken image links, restructuring repo folders every single time I added a new project, I stepped back and I asked a simple question. What does a portfolio actually need to do? Not what the internet says, not what do other data people use. What does it need to do for the people reviewing it? And I landed on 3 principles that I call the 3 E's. Number 1, easy to access. The portfolio must be accessible with one click. No login, no GitHub account required, no cloning repos, no downloading anything. One URL and the person is looking at your work. If there's any friction between the hiring manager clicking your link and seeing your projects, you are losing to candidates who simply had portfolios that loaded instantly. Think of every every extra click as a drop-off percentage. Next, easy to navigate. The portfolio must be structured so that a non-technical person, which is most people, can understand what they're looking at within 5 seconds. Clear project titles, clear section headers, a visual layout that guides the eye from project to project without requiring the reviewer to figure out how your file structure works. If someone has to wonder, where do I click to even see the actual work? You have already failed the navigation test. All right, third, easy to consume. Every project in the portfolio must communicate 3 things without the reviewer having to open a single code file. What was the business question you answered? What did you find? And what do you recommend? If the only way to understand your project is to download Jupyter Notebook files or having to download these SQL files or having to read through 1,000 lines of code, the reviewer is not going to do it. They will close your tab and move on to the next person. Your project insight needs to be consumable in under 30 seconds. Actually, probably under 10 seconds. Per project in plain language with a visual. And a GitHub repo fails all 3 of these E's. Quick pause. Now, if you want to land your first job in data analytics and avoid the lengthy mistakes that I did, click the link in the pinned comment where you can find the exact steps that my students use to land their job in data analytics without going back to school. All right, now let's get back to it. So what passes the 3 E's? What format is free, requires no code, and can be built and updated in a fraction of the time it takes to maintain a GitHub portfolio. That is Canva. And I know some of you reacted with, what the heck is Canva? That's a design tool. That's not a serious portfolio platform. I hear you. And I thought the same thing, but let me show you exactly why it works better than anything else I've tried. And I've tried everything. So here's why Canva passes all 3 E's. Number 1, Canva allows you to publish any design as a free website on its own URL. No hosting fees, no domain purchase, no code. You build it, you hit publish, and you get a link that opens instantly on any browser. You can take this link and add it to your LinkedIn and your resume. Easy to navigate. Canva is a visual-first tool. You drag and drop sections and you create clear headers. You can control exactly what the reviewer sees and in what exact order. There's no file trees. There's no README competing with other code files for attention. The layout is exactly what you design it to be. And easy to consume. For every project, you can create a visual card with a business question on top, 3 key insights in the middle. And recommendations on the bottom and a chart or 2 with a dashboard screenshot as a visual anchor. The entire project is consumable in under 10 seconds without opening a single file of code or having to download anything. Now I know what some of you're thinking. Won't hiring managers think Canva isn't serious? Don't they want to see my GitHub to prove I can actually code? 2 things. First of all, your GitHub does not have to go away. You could absolutely still have your repos with the full code. You can link them from within your Canva portfolio under each project, but the first touchpoint, the thing that determines whether they look further, needs to be visual, fast, and accessible. And that's gonna be your Canva portfolio. GitHub can be the backup for anyone who wants to go deeper, but honestly, most won't and most don't care. The ones who do will click through. Second, the hiring managers for data analytics roles are not evaluating your Git workflow. They're evaluating whether you can find an insight, explain it clearly, and make a recommendation a business can act on. A clean visual portfolio demonstrates all 3 in under 10 seconds. A GitHub repo demonstrates that you just know how to commit code. Which one do you think gets the interview? All right, so this is what I want you to do today. Go to Canva, pick any of the thousands and thousands of different website templates, put your name on the top, and add the projects that you have been building in your spare time. Publish it, post it on LinkedIn, and then you can feel free to tag me so I can see it. That is a 30-minute task that will do more for your job search than the last 30 hours you spent fighting with your GitHub repos. If you want to see exactly how to build the kind of projects that belong in this portfolio, the ones that real business impact that hiring managers actually respond to, watch this video next.
