A person with a portfolio career is one who creates multiple income streams from different employment sources. Instead of working in a traditional full-time job with one particular organisation, you are involved in multiple part-time jobs with different employers or as a self-employed person. These part-time jobs may include a combination of freelancing, associate positions, temporary jobs, contract work, part-time arrangements and a work from home business.
Focus on Skills and Accomplishments
In a normal full-time job, you are defined by your title and/or position and its attendant job scope. A portfolio career, on the other hand, is defined by your skills and accomplishments. Rachelle Canter in her book Make the Right Career Move [Wiley, October 27, 2006] views a portfolio career as “the accumulation of portable skills and marketable accomplishments”; and because these can be applied to a myriad of settings, you expand your potential career options far more than a collection of positions can.
The jobs may be complementary or completely unconnected. For example, you might be a career professional in executive coaching as well as motivational speaker who writes articles on leadership development. Or you could combine image consulting with modeling and fashion merchandising. Alternatively, you could be in IT project management and building your retirement income through affiliate programs in nutritional health supplements. Or you could spend a three-day week in the office as a graphic web design expert so you have time to build your photography career.
Reasons to Pursue a Portfolio Career
There are many reasons for considering a portfolio career. You could be a parent seeking a better work-life balance so that you can spend more time raising your child. Or you are at a career crossroads, disillusioned with corporate politics and want a strategy to take on new challenges and reinvent yourself.
Perhaps you are a recent graduate who is not willing to be tied down to a full-time job and want to pursue different interests and explore various money making ideas. Or you lack job satisfaction in your current occupation and, not excited by the prospect of doing the same thing everyday, are on the look out for openings that make use of your talents and give you greater fulfillment.
Quite possibly you also want to do it for the autonomy and control over the work that you perform, since you are the main decision maker on the tasks to undertake. Time flexibility is also important and you are grateful for the diversity and variety in your days, revelling in the immense scope for personal growth.
In his book Jobshift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs [Da Capo Press, October 15, 1995] organisational management consultant and author William Bridges puts forth his thesis that the traditional notion of a “job” that lasts a lifetime is fast disappearing, to be replaced by a range of flexible and variable work arrangements which requires a radically new perspective on how to make a living.
A portfolio career is one such solution, offering multiple income sources simultaneously by applying your various skills and talents developed through study and experience. Of course, not all career paths lend themselves to such an arrangement, so determine if a portfolio career is for you. It is amazing how much freedom and flexibility you can inject into your working life with a little change in perspective.
