Proving Your Education – Letters of Recommendation

This post thread started with my book review of Proving You’re Qualified.

In my last post I discussed one of the elements of an education portfolio – résumés. Although what elements go into the making of a good education portfolio varies by individual and job target, a good one might consist of a résumé, letters of recommendation, testimonials, work samples and documentation of learning. I’ll discuss letters of recommendation in this post and the remaining elements in future posts.

Letters of Recommendation

Letters of recommendation are typically written by past employers or clients extolling your background, virtues and skills to another potential employer. Aren’t sure what one looks like? Just go to your favorite web search engine and type in “letters of recommendation” (with the quotes) and you’ll see all sorts of sites devoted to this topic including lots of sample letters.

How do you get a letter of recommendation? You ask!

So many people think it’s wrong to ask for a letter of recommendation. It’s not. Go ahead and ask. Even better yet (and you may find this strange at first), write the letter yourself. I mean it. Write your own letter of recommendation and present it to the person you want the letter from. When presenting it say something like “I know you’re a busy person and I’d like a letter of recommendation from you. I’ve taken the liberty of writing one myself. Of course, you can change it or write your own, but if you agree with what it says and just want to sign it, that would be great. Let me leave this with you and you can look it over.”

You’ll be shocked by how many people will simply sign it. Why? Because the hard work of writing the letter is done for them. Assuming you’ve portrayed yourself accurately in the letter and you know the person sees you and your work as you do, they will likely sign the letter.

When presenting the letter, have it printed on the company or department letterhead. This adds significant credibility to the letter. Make sure to identify the person’s title under their printed name, just below where they’ll add their signature. If you don’t have access to the company stationery, create a simple, professional-looking stationery letterhead yourself and use that. Use at least their name and title in the letterhead. If the company name, address, phone number and email in the letterhead seem appropriate, add those too. You can always offer to alter the letterhead text before they sign it if they don’t like it. There are thousands of letterhead templates available. Again, simply type in “letterhead templates” into your favorite search engine and you’ll find plenty of them.

Try to mix up the way you write these letters of recommendation. You don’t want them to sound like they’ve all been written by you. Likewise, if you create the letterhead for them, don’t use the same template twice.

If the only way to get a letter of recommendation is as an email, then take it. A printout of an email might not have the visual impact of a signed letter on letterhead, but it can still be powerful and influential to those who read it. In this technological age we live in people are used to seeing even important communications in email format.

Come back to my blog as I talk about the other elements of an education portfolio in future posts.