Portfolio Careers
What is a Portfolio Career?
And How Can I Build One?
It involves doing several, often very different, activities in order to earn a living and can be a complex but ultimately rewarding experience.
Most of us grow up with little idea of what we want to be when we become adults. There are exceptions of course; the lucky few who decide at the age of five that they want to be doctors or teachers and go ahead to create a successful and rewarding career in that field.. but for the rest of us, it's a very different story . Sometimes we feel we have wound up in a job by chance, doing what someone else - a teacher or parent - told us we would be good at. Or we do something because we find it easy and drift from school to further or higher education, continuing to study our best subjects and then whatever job most people who take those subjects end up in, or, especially now, with increase student debt, we might just take the first job we are offered and ten or twenty years later find we are still there.
Even when we make more conscious
career choices, boredom can creep in very quickly. The problem is that
we are individuals, each with a huge variety of skills, preferences and
knowledge, but jobs are simply not built to fit individuals, individuals
are expected to fit jobs.
The bottom line is that it's not all that likely that you will find all
of the things you want out of a career in one job. Now this may not be all
that important when you are just starting out - you're excited by the fact
that you finally have some money and you are enjoying spending it! As for
the job itself, you are learning, the whole experience is new. However,
once the job becomes familiar, you start to get tired of the daily drudge.
If this happens repeatedly and you find yourself job-hopping as a result,
it may be worth considering a portfolio career, which simply means earning
your living in several different part-time occupations. Don't be put off
- does not mean holding down two or three badly paid jobs just so that you
can make ends meet. It can mean having several highly skilled, professional
posts, and eventually this is likely to develop into a mixture of employment
and self-employment.
If this idea appeals to you, make a list of everything you would like to get out of a job and all the skills and knowledge you would like to use at work, including skills you would like to learn from scratch or develop to a higher level.
Then take a look at your present job and see how many items on the list can be ticked. You may some quite a few or not so many, but don't be put off -even if you find none at all.
The next step is to do some research to find out how you could use the remaining skills or knowledge on your list. Could you set up a small business or take some courses which would enable you to work in another field? Is it possible to cut back the amount of time you spend in your present job to create space for a second part-time occupation?
It can take time to establish your portfolio, but like anything worthwhile, the rewards can be immense. For example, if you end up with job satisfaction 90% of the time compared with 30 or 40% now, it will be worth the effort. And since we have no choice but to accept the death of the "job for life," having several ways of earning a living will be a great asset.. If one source of income dries up due to redundancy, a change in consumer trends or your boss going bust, you have two or three others to fall back on. You can choose to expand these, or, since you are used to being flexible, you could view this as an opportunity to start something new. So although it isn't something you can set up overnight, a portfolio career has many advantages, not least of which is that it provides a way of safeguarding your future earning power.
© Waller Jamison 2006
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