Multiple Careers

At the end of a day working through a to do list that felt like the length of a significant tributary to the Thames, I had a moment to idly google some possible alternative terms for ‘portfolio career’. Not very imaginatively I started with ‘multiple careers’ and found an article on the Financial Times website that proudly announced ‘Multiple careers are better than one’.  Obviously, as a committed portfolio careerist, I had to agree.

In this article Luke Johnson says that people who have multiple careers are impressive business people due to the career changes which lead to an accumulation of multiple skills and achievements across a range of disciplines. He gives examples such as Benjamin Franklin and Ronald Reagan who switched focus more than once in their lives. He says that its laziness that prevents us from breaking the mould and sticking to a cautious career route. Luke cites our increasing longevity as a catalyst to encourage us to do more than one thing with our working lives.

The difference with a portfolio career is that you might also do more than one thing at the same time. I wholeheartedly agree that we have capacity to master a range of disciplines, change tack, find new directions and push ourselves to explore more than one career in our lifetime. Indeed, I think it's increasingly becoming a necessity. My concern with Luke’s article is that he doesn’t take into account that earning a living in a range of fields doesn’t have to be linear, with only one is focus at any one time. Despite advance in healthcare, life’s still pretty short in the grand scheme of things, there’s lots to pack in and with a bit of imagination, hard work and creativity – you can!