Exactly three years ago, I was designing Halsey’s Manic World Tour staircase.
Today I’m working on vastly different projects. It wasn’t starting over, I had new skills (and a lot of knowledge on how concerts work).
I’m not the only one with these career transitions. Look at the Great Resignation: over 4 million Americans quit every month for a year. Employees that switched jobs in the last two years often haven’t met a single coworker in person. And there are more coworking or hybrid workspaces than ever.
Modern work is changing.
Our society has both the language and the infrastructure to create more dynamic work experiences. Enter: the portfolio career as a way to think about and craft a professional future.
A portfolio career is a process of discovery and fulfillment, trials and failures. It is a journey. The work reflects an evolving identity and an innate desire to learn.
For example, some titles in my portfolio include researcher, project manager, writer, speaker, designer, operator, and investor.
Portfolio careers are gaining traction.
Rich Roll recently commented, with a twinge of personal regret, on the benefits of a diverse career. “You become a more robust individual. You understand different walks of life and different perspectives. You start to figure out what you enjoy doing and what you don’t enjoy doing.”
“Let fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
The famous Henry Ford believed strongly in experimentation.
He was such a believer in the power of experimentation and the benefits of failure, in fact, that no one in the factory could keep a record of the factory experiments that were attempted and failed. Keep those records and “you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try.”
How does this relate?
Experimentation is the keystone of a portfolio career. Intentional experimentation adds to a tool belt of experiences, but it’s important to connect the dots or the journey can be ambiguous.
To navigate that ambiguity, look at another familiar portfolio. An investment portfolio is constructed to diversify holdings and mitigate risk. A portfolio career requires the same: diversifying the types of work to create a balanced career portfolio and allow yourself the opportunity for upside. “Sprinkle in the $10k (high-leverage work) pixie dust,” as RadReads’ Khe Hy would say.
Like structuring an investment portfolio for retirement savings, building a career portfolio is the equivalent of crafting a professional future. You have to be a wayfinder.
For me personally, framing the future as a portfolio career has helped to turn what might appear as dots into insights.
Specific experiences or skills might offer just the impact that someone needs down the road. And companies today value employees with a set of unique and diverse experiences. For me, applying a systems-thinking mindset that I learned as an engineer to non-engineering work has been rewarding as I can create no-code operations and repeatable business operations.
It can be a struggle, though. For all the strengths that portfolio thinking offers, there is less security available and it often requires more energy. You have to draw the career map instead of reading it, and while that’s a valuable skill, not every potential employer or field will embrace that style.
But at the end of the day, building a diverse set of experiences keeps us learning. To close with another Ford quote, “The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”
Stay curious.
Sources:
- Morning Brew: You’ve Never Met Your Coworkers
- Harvard Business Review: Career Portfolio
- Rich Roll Podcasts with Rainn Wilson and Roll On
- My Life and Work by Henry Ford
- Collaborative Fund: Experts
- Business Insider: Great Resignation
Three not-so-good things
- less security: may not be able to advance, or if contracted may end abruptly
- not as embraced: some fields it’ll limit your hiring prospects
- you have to draw the map instead of read it
Takeaways:
- Understanding the commonalities. There are a few things that never change.
Sources:
https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/2021/09/09/youve-never-met-coworkers-irl
https://hbr.org/2021/10/why-you-should-build-a-career-portfolio-not-a-career-path
this article
- portfolio approach to 10k works. always sprinkle in some work of other tiers or nothing will move forward.
- rainn wilson. Fail. If you view the 20s as a workshop stage, you can relax a little bit.
“If you view the 20’s as a workshop stage, you can relax a little bit,” declared Rainn Wilson on the Rich Roll podcast. Do I say this as a security blanket to tie together my journey? Not quite. There are benefits to a portfolio style career, especially early in your career.
- I wish I had spent my time in my 20s to try to really figure out who i wanted to be
- having many many many experiences and not worrying so much about the ladder of your career trajectory. You become a more robust individual. You understand different walks of life and different perspectives. You start to figure out what you enjoy doing and what you don’t enjoy doing. It’s hard to intellectualize that, you have to go into the world and do things.”
Henry Ford, My Life and Work
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/experts/
- Bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists.
- Things evolve faster than people’s beliefs
- Experienced this and learned to evolve faster
- Side effect of expertise is an inability to accept new ideas.
- Henry Ford: no one could keep a record of the factory experiments that were tried and failed. Keeping those records, you’ll have too many things that cannot be done.
- Let fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
- Things evolve to allow what was once impossible to now become practical
- Marc Andreessen: The ideas of the 90s were all correct, they were just early. So almost every business plan that was mocked for being a ridiculous idea that failed is now, 20 years later, a viable industry.
- no age has a monopoly on insight. Everyone has something to teach. The new is always thought odd.
- you need to have different dots to form insights and wisdom. Where you source those dots and how you connect them are up to you.