Portfolio careers inevitably involve a variety of roles that necessitate the wearing of multiple hats in the space of the average week. Sometimes this 'hat changing' may even take place on the same day depending on the nature of your portfolio.
It's not unusual for me to be playing the role of creative consultant one moment, professional editor the next and later that same day teaching a class of undergraduates. In fact that's exactly what my day looked like today.
Having spent over a decade in my earlier career in traditional office-based employed roles, I know that in today's fast paced world jobs will often require a broad spectrum of skills and therefore require a similar level of regular hat switching albeit within a much more singular framework. It's therefore really not such a leap to transfer multiple skills used in one job to a variety of jobs that make up a portfolio career. The key difference is only that the elements of your portfolio career may be more disparate as they may not relate to a single area, industry or practice. The layer of complexity this adds is offset by the fact that you may not necessarily need the volume or variety of skills in each separate area of your portfolio as you might in a single full time role.
A designer, for example, working as a freelancer for part of their portfolio career rather than as an employee as part of a production team, still needs core design skills of course. They may not though, need to participate in contributing to the team's wider strategies and objectives which may require a broader skillset thereby freeing up skills and time to be deployed elsewhere in the portfolio career.
The flexibility, adaptability and multiple skills required to survive in today's fast moving, 'no more jobs for life' environment are highly relevant to portfolio careers. It's just a case of joining up the dots and applying skills to the new ways of working the portfolio career represents.
It's not unusual for me to be playing the role of creative consultant one moment, professional editor the next and later that same day teaching a class of undergraduates. In fact that's exactly what my day looked like today.
Having spent over a decade in my earlier career in traditional office-based employed roles, I know that in today's fast paced world jobs will often require a broad spectrum of skills and therefore require a similar level of regular hat switching albeit within a much more singular framework. It's therefore really not such a leap to transfer multiple skills used in one job to a variety of jobs that make up a portfolio career. The key difference is only that the elements of your portfolio career may be more disparate as they may not relate to a single area, industry or practice. The layer of complexity this adds is offset by the fact that you may not necessarily need the volume or variety of skills in each separate area of your portfolio as you might in a single full time role.
A designer, for example, working as a freelancer for part of their portfolio career rather than as an employee as part of a production team, still needs core design skills of course. They may not though, need to participate in contributing to the team's wider strategies and objectives which may require a broader skillset thereby freeing up skills and time to be deployed elsewhere in the portfolio career.
The flexibility, adaptability and multiple skills required to survive in today's fast moving, 'no more jobs for life' environment are highly relevant to portfolio careers. It's just a case of joining up the dots and applying skills to the new ways of working the portfolio career represents.
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