Great piece in Fast Company magazine firstly talking about ‘broken tile syndrome’ – read it and see. And then  about the fact that most of us are much more skilled in complaining than we are at giving positive feedback.

As portfolio workers often moving in and out of organisations we have great opportunities of ‘catching people doing something right’ or telling someone the positive thought that we have sitting in the front of our brain but which of course is totally invisible to the person in front of us. This is how professional and personal relationships develop. You don’t want to appear gushing – but most people do not even get so far as dribbling. Attack gratitude deficit disorder now!

As our book is based all around answering this question and I talk about this to groups rather a lot I was intrigued to come across Marianne Cantwell’s advice on this in a stimulating and fun video on her Free Range Humans website. It has also led to an interesting discussion on our portfolio careers linkedin group. Marianne – who by the way also contributed to our book – talks about deciding which of your portfolio career elements to emphasize as talking about them all might be overwhelming. You pick and choose according to your audience. I can see the wisdom of this but it also links to the brand that you are developing. For example, I always disclose my full portfolio including my voluntary roles. But then I am reinforcing my brand as an expert on portfolio careers so this is appropriate. If I was a web designer plus 3 other roles then I would emphasize the former if that was where I was pitching for work.

The linkedin group also gets into whether or not you should have more than one linkedin profile. I’m not even sure that is possible but even if it is probably you will need to disclose your entire portfolio on their site. You may want to reconfigure what pops up first depending on meetings that you are having.

Whatever, it is good to really think hard about this and especially to get you to focus on your audience. Katie likes to use a powerpoint slide which makes the point:

Whenever I answer the question ‘And what do you do?’, I always include at least one of the roles that I have that consists of unpaid work. I think that it gives a rounder picture of who you are and what is important to you. My 2 roles are around chairing my local residents association and running 10k races for charity.

We have always emphasised to anyone who is job seeking, be that for a portfolio career or not, that is crucial that you are seen as someone who is doing something of value. The skills that you exercise or indeed develop in these roles as well as being satisfying and hopefully motivational in themselves may also be ones relevant to paid work. We were intrigued therefore to see that LinkedIn is now letting  users list their public-spirited deeds and philanthropic efforts alongside job experience under a new section called “Volunteer Experience and Causes.” According to a survey by LinkedIn, now more than ever, volunteer experience is valuable information that could give job hunters the boost they need to get promoted or hired.

LinkedIn randomly selected and surveyed 1,942 people and found that a vast majority of them–89%–had volunteer experience. But this unpaid work went largely unreported. Only 45% of the respondents actually reported volunteer experiences on their career profiles. Survey responders said they didn’t think such experiences would count for much, and they didn’t think managers would be interested. The thought to add that experience to their profile hadn’t occurred to some of them.   But when the question was turned around, 41% of the same people polled said they considered volunteer experience as valuable as paid work experience. And 20% of the hiring managers polled in the survey admitted to making hiring decisions based on volunteer work.

Nicole Williams, Connection Director at LinkedIn, says that recruiters are now looking at volunteer experience as real work experience if job candidates are able to talk about their achievements while volunteering in a quantifiable way. For example, talking about how you grew the Twitter following for an event you managed as an event coordinator would make a strong impression. The goal is to translate the description of your volunteer work into the vocabulary of employment, Williams says.

So – test it out now – in private.  ‘And what do you do?’ ……….

“50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours.”

This is the start of an amusing piece by Mark Suster. I love it as it justifies all the coffees that I invite people to have with me at my 2 favourite water holes in Leeds. So if you are in Leeds just invite me for a coffee.

Many portfolio workers enjoy having voluntary activities as part of their portfolio. Some of our colleagues have also written to say that a bonus sometimes is that the networking opportunities provided by this can also result in paid work offers. Time banking is an international concept that enables people to swap skills and experience by depositing them and then withdrawing equivalents from others who poseess different skills.  I guess that many of us have had a variety of quid pro quo arrangements such as ” I will write your marketing blurb if you will design a spreadsheet for me”.

There are a variety of videos on the site which will give you a real feel for how the concept works and indeed how you could set one up yourself.  It would be good to hear from any of our followers who have had direct experience of this.

Portfolio people meet up in London, Monday 13th June. A chance to meet and chat with people who share your workstyle.

After posting Hugh Macleod’s cartoon about networking yesterday serendipity struck – like it often does in life – and we saw a video of our friend Andy Lopata introducing the new edition of his previous best selling book on networking. The wonderfully idiosyncratic title comes from some research some years ago as to what terrified managers. No 1 was walking into a room full of strangers. No 2 was having to give a presentation. And death came third..

This has just come out so we haven’t read it yet but will do so.

Readers of this blog and of our book know how much we rate the cartoons of Hugh Macleod and his Gaping Void Gallery. We have 12 of them in our book. This one I think is a  beauty and says it all as far as portfolio careers are concerned.

Don’t know how many of you get the Linkedin portfolio careers group. It is now an open group and we have almost 300 members and increasingly people are initiating some very interesting discussions. If you have not joined please do so and then you will be notified of any new discussions.

This is a beautiful video that expresses concisely the power of words. So many portfolio workers rely on communication to get us work, to deliver work and to review our work. Networking in particular though crucial we argue to every worker is especially vital to us. Enjoy! And be creative.