Portfolio Careers

Not many people are born knowing which career to follow and if you aren’t one of them, a portfolio career could be the answer. You may feel jealous of the lucky few who decide at an early age, follow through on that childhood decision and are happy in their jobs.

However, if you aren’t among them, you are in the majority. It’s a different story for most of us - we end up in a job either by chance – the opportunity arose and we took it. Or perhaps we followed the advice of an influential adult, taking up a career because a teacher or parent thought we would be good at. Or take up a particular subject because we find it easy and then drift from school into college, studying the same easy subject and then whatever job most graduates in the field choose, even if it isn’t what we really want to do .

Even if you did make a more conscious career choice, you may find in a year or two that you are not really enjoying your job. This isn’t an unusual situation and arises because each of us has a unique personality. Like everyone else, you have your own package of skills, preferences and knowledge. This is where the problem lies - jobs just aren’t created to fit individuals, it’s the individuals who are expected to fit into the jobs.

So it’s not surprising if you can’t find everything you are looking for in one job. Whilst that may not be important when you are just starting out in your career - when everything is new and your pay cheque is a novelty - once the job becomes familiar, you may start getting itchy feet. This situation can sometimes lead to job-hopping, if you find yourself in one boring job after another.

If this has happened to you, take a look at your personal definition of job satisfaction. Write down everything you want to get out of a job and all the skills you’d like to use. If you need some help with this, Design Your Ideal Career, the first module of the Jobseekers’ Success Kit goes through this process in detail.

Once you’ve decided which skills and activities are important to you, it may be worth considering a portfolio career, which simply means earning your living by doing several different things, each on a part-time basis. This is not the same thing as holding down two or three badly paid jobs to make ends meet. Your portfolio could consist of several highly skilled jobs, and could involve a mixture of employment and self-employment.

Once you’ve got the ideas for your portfolio, you’ll have to develop it over a number of years, continuing your full-time job for a while in most cases. But if you find that in 5 years’ time your job satisfaction has increased to 80-90% compared with 30 or 40% now, it will have been well worth it.

And since experts are predicting the death of the “job for life,” if you have more than one method of earning a living, you’ll be building your own insurance against redundancy or unemployment. Should one source of income dry up, you’ll be able to fall back on several others. And the flexibility you’ll have developed in the meantime will help you overcome the ups and downs of the economy. Career change can be gradual and can be successful at any age.

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