The Guardian has a great article on Who needs a CV in Mull? where multi-tasking is a way of life. And the inhabitants wouldn’t have it any other way. Coincidently, Hugh MacLeod, who provided us with many of the drawings in our book also had a grandfather in the Scottish Highlands who was a crofter and Hugh describes his memories of being there and living with a man who also clearly pursued a portfolio career but of course without using the term. His description is on pages 16 – 17 in the book.

I had the very challenging experience recently of having our own question thrown straight at me. It was an interview conducted by vitae who have interviewed many people over the past year or so to give undergraduates and new graduates some case studies to help stimulute them to thinking more about what they want from a career. Their audience are primarily researchers, many of whom will be attracted to or find themselves embracing a portfolio career. My job was to convince them that a research and academic background can also serve as a launch pad for entrepreneurial activity. Not an easy task especially if you talk as much as I do! What you see is a heavily edited version of what was an hour long interview.  Clearly the objective here is very different from what we discuss in our book about getting your story right for networking and marketing situations. But it did serve to help me identify patterns in my career which I had not actually articulated before. It was a result of this that I came up with my byline:

helping people to become architects of their own future

As a learning point – I was in my mid 60’s before I came up with that!  With what I now know I would always recommend people to identify a byline which encapsulates what you do. And you know – you are allowed to change that as you develop!

This could be a valuable exercise for you to try. Get someone to interview about your career so far. Get them to ask you to:

• describe your career to date
• see if you can discover themes that run throughout
• distinguish between what you did that made you come alive – and of course the opposite
• analyse whether or not there is any logic in your choice of jobs or whether it is largely intuitive
• summarise how happy you are with the choices that you have made so far
• explore what you would like to develop in the future

We would suggest that you attempt to film this interview as viewing this and hearing yourself will also tell you a great deal. If you do this we would love to hear how you got on.

Great title for an article and indeed one with this title was published in today’s  Financial Times by Mike Southon who has some good things to say about our book.

“For those of us with a “portfolio career”, a one-line description of what we do can be a challenge. Some people assume I am a journalist, but I have to explain that I am a columnist and hardly know anyone at the Financial Times other than my editor. Others know me from speaking at events, but the soubriquet “professional speaker” can have negative connotations – I sometimes have to provide reassurance that I am not about to launch into a presentation.

I try to explain that I am a mentor – though not a coach or a counsellor – and my life involves different activities every day. This job description can look very attractive to someone bored with the daily grind of a job in which they have long lost interest. But I have to explain that going from secure employment to a portfolio career requires a change in lifestyle and attitude to work.”

We agree Mike and know exactly what you are talking about and of course would not revert back to a ‘proper job’.

In our book we have a whole chapter on this crucial topic and an exercise (we call them Can Do’s) to help you identify your key values. We recently came across another way of analysing your results from this exercise by Rebecca Nestor. This took me back to research techniques that I used to use when I worked at Leeds University but I thought was intriguing enough to pass on to you. We invited Rebecca to do a guest posting in which she described the process. You will find this on her own website. She describes it as being ‘a bit nerdy’. I know a number of portfolio workers who would fall under that category – including me – so do have a look and have a go.

We get asked this so many times that we have decided to put our questionnaire online. This is taken from Step 1 in the book. Look at the tabs across the top of the page and you will see the question posed. Click down and you will find the questionnaire. This is not interactive so you will need to revert to good old fashioned intermediate technology – print it off!

Another TED talk and this one is about work life balance. Readers of this site and our book will know that we have strong reasons for preferring the phrase work life blend. However, the points he makes in his very sardonic manner are worth the 10 minute view. Nigel has also written 2 books – Overpaid and Underlaid and Fat, Forty and Fired.

We have yet to find a job or profession that cannot form part of a person’s portfolio career so you might like to see how it can be done in medicine. I only just came across this article which is now 3 years old but the points are all valid.

Interesting piece from CNN on multiple jobs. Interestingly the hospital clown clearly enjoys his work but the over riding ‘feel’ to the piece is that having more than one job is very stressful and that most people would not choose this as a workstyle if they could get a ‘proper job’. We of course know that this might fit for some portfolio workers but the majority from our research in the UK suggests that they choose this style of work as it enables them to use more of their motivated skills and to implement their passions. We definitely do not feel like clowns!

This is the title of a great posting from Marianne Cantwell and if you do not look at her blog you should. Marianne wrote a short piece for us for our book and she has given us permission to reproduce an edited version of this posting. I especially just love her comment that, ‘I’ve thrown away my career so many times I should be fined for littering’. So over to Marianne:

“You consider changing career, and people warn you against taking the ‘risk’.

“Jumping around looks bad on your CV”.

“It’s a REALLY hard industry to break into… besides, you have a great career already”.

I’ve heard all those things and more. In fact, I’ve thrown away my career so many times I should be fined for littering:

THROW 1: When graduating from high school I decided to not capitalise on the marks that would get me into medicine or law. I was told I was throwing my future away by pursuing a pointless ‘fun’ degree: “you’ll regret this forever, you can never go back”.

A few years down the line, I loved my field of study so much I worked incredibly hard, and had offers of a promising academic career. Suddenly my ‘detractors’ were 100% behind me and my ‘respectable’ path.

THROW 2: However, then I went travelling around Europe (it’s an Aussie thing). When I got to London, I loved it and decided to stay for a while longer and break into media.

Oh dear. What about the academic career? The same people said I was ruining my life (again).

But then I established a ‘hot’ (but soul destroying) career in television for a Very Big Company. My ‘play it safe’ crowd were my fans now. They LOVED that I had a safe and clear career path.

THROW 3: Do you think that lasted? Nope! I decided to ditch media altogether… and my safety-first crowd went into meltdown….

Did I become homeless? No! I re-branded myself, and landed a role as a director in a new and exciting City consultancy. Ooh, suddenly the detractor-crew were on board again.

THROW 4: When I quit that to become a career coach, my ‘play-it-safers’ collapsed at the pain of it all. Why would you throw away the money, the kudos, the job title, the progression… oh god, everything… to pursue a crazy dream about ‘helping people be happy’ and working from your laptop on a beach? Insane!

But you know what? By that time, I stopped caring about those people’s opinions. Which was the right move, because, well, you know what happened next.

As soon as I became successful, the ‘conventional’ crew were behind me again.

When I am interviewed about careers in the Times, or appear on television talking about career change, or when I am asked to discuss writing a book/planning a TV show in this field, suddenly the very people who said “that’s crazy, it’s just too hard” are right behind me

It’s like they forgot their premonitions of doom and failure.  What if I had listened to these detractors?

Well, I’d be a very bad doctor (scary for us all), a frustrated academic, or one of those incredibly beaten down unhealthy-looking people who spend their lives in an airless office, wondering how a job in a cool-sounding company can be so DULL in reality.  I’d be bitter and envious of people who got to gallivant around having coffee with fabulous thinkers and authors all day. I’d be living for the weekends while my life ebbed away.  That is a MASSIVE price to pay for listening to someone else’s fears.

Are you currently paying heed to people who say your dream of career change is not possible? Do you believe the myth that you might be ‘throwing it all away’?  It’s time to stop that – take it from a non-doctor: listening to (secretly scared) risk-averse detractors is not only pointless, it’s bad for your health.”

Great advice. You can read more of Marianne’s writing at Free Range Humans http://www.free-range-humans.com/

This is the title of a fascinating article on CNNMoney.com which, in effect, is making similar points to those being discussed increasingly in the UK. Employers are sometimes the last to see the pluses of having a much more flexible work force which would also include these strange people called portfolio workers.

In 2005, the US government estimated that 31% of  workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.  James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation’s workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today.

What is interesting is to read the comments of Sara Horowitz, the founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, an advocacy group for freelancers and independent contractors, who states that employment laws and protections have been slow to recognize this shift. For example, independent contractors aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. And they have to pay both the employee and the employer match on their Social Security taxes.  But Horowitz said not everyone who works as a freelancer or independent contractor is unhappy with their situation.  She estimates about 30% are satisfied with the arrangement, about equal to the number who desperately want to find a full-time job with benefits. The other 40% are somewhere in the middle, feeling pleased by aspects of their job and unhappy about others.  “It’s not that most want to be freelancers or don’t want to be freelancers. They’re just following the work, and the work itself is evolving,” she said.

Portfolio workers are beating a path to a new concept of paid work. As we say in our book, this is not a workstyle for everyone but for those who tried it very few ever wish to return to so-called full time job.