Portfolio career

There are 3 key stages to launching your own successful portfolio career:

Stage 1: Re-evaluating your career

Stage 2: Marketing your portfolio career

Stage 3: Managing your portfolio career

Stage 1: Re-evaluating your career

Deep self-reflection is common and very useful, if not essential, before starting your portfolio career, in order to ensure efficiency, maximum success, minimum stress, and a bespoke work-life blend to fit you exactly.

Many life and work events create a career or life crossroads – a catalyst for a need to re-evaluate and a desire to make a positive change. These include; not achieving a promotion or pay rise, having a baby, divorce, returning to work after having children, a stress tipping point, moving locations/countries for a partner’s job, redundancy or a bereavement.

Stage 2: Marketing your portfolio career

Research by Executive Appointments shows that the most important elements for success are networking and self-marketing. Yet in their study, 32% of professionals worry about finding suitable roles and 21% worry about the constant need to network.

We help many of our clients to market themselves. Women naturally feel uncomfortable marketing themselves, which is partly why a low proportion of women achieve partnership or enjoy the same rewards as their male peers, with the result that many women opt out of the law. We help our clients to find self-marketing strategies that work and are time and cost-efficient. We have run many events and written articles in this area and, as seasoned networkers, we can support you in many ways.

Stage 3: Managing your portfolio career

Multiple work strands means more things to juggle, so it is essential to be organised and have good systems and processes in order to be efficient and look professional.

We have perfected our own self-management over the last 17 years so can share shortcuts and tips to help, including time-saving technology, templates and tools, and using a virtual PA.

Contact us to find out how we can help you: https://www.inspiringportfoliocareers.com/portfolio/connect/

We explored the pros and cons of a portfolio career in an earlier blog.

For professionals working in traditional cultures in the corporate world, the pros of freedom, autonomy and flexibility are very motivating and create energy to tackle any cons.

Many people are typically naturally modest, worry, tend to focus on other people’s needs and dislike self marketing. They find it hard to see what makes them great and marketable, and it can be hard to be creative in identifying how else they can use their skills.

In order to create and have a successful portfolio career over time, you need to be good at finding clients, identifying your niche, defining your brand, establishing and maintaining your reputation, identifying new insights for your competitive advantage, managing your time and yourself, finding and being active in suitable networks, understanding social media, and translating trends into opportunities.

Many people, especially working mothers, have busy work and home lives and it can be hard to get started. We have listed typical perceived blocks to progress below.  The good news is that we can help you to tackle all of these potential blocks and overcome any additional obstacles as they arise.

Common perceived blocks:

• lack of time to think, research and plan;
• lack of clarity or confidence to make the right decision;
• risk aversion – you are a lawyer, so it is not surprising;
• large financial commitments;
• overwhelm about what needs to be done;
• no strategy or process to evaluate options and make a decision;
• perfectionism – wanting to get everything right before making a change;
• over thinking/‘analysis paralysis’ – focusing on what might go wrong instead of taking action, learning and evaluating as you go;
• feeling unclear about your transferable skills and what else you could do;
• dislike of self-marketing;
• listening to other people’s fears instead of following your instinct;
• putting other people’s needs before your own, such as concern about disappointing others, eg your parents who paid for your education.

Research by Executive Appointments with portfolio careerists showed that two-thirds of them were quite or very satisfied with their success in establishing a portfolio career. The most motivating factors from the research about having a portfolio career are shown below.

Creating a clear goal and plan and identifying fears and actual/perceived blocks is essential for success, as well as creating a strategy to market and manage yourself. Our Energise career e course helps you to evaluate your career to date in depth, to identify your blocks and fears and to create strategies to overcome each. It also helps you to create a career goal and plan to achieve it

• World food prices are increasing due to food shortages, the cost of living is rising but wages are not increasing at the same rate: the ‘squeezed middle’ are feeling the pinch financially and their prospects of keeping up with higher costs through employment alone are diminishing.
• Childcare costs have grown by 4 times the rate of inflation: families question the sense of the mother, the primary child carer in the majority of cases, working full-time.

What economic factors would you add?

• People are not one-dimensional and don’t fit into a neat ‘box’: they have different skills and interests.
• People are more used to choice and change: the Internet, social media and internationalism are exposing people to new ideas and new outlooks. People like the idea that they can design and change their career as they wish.
• Employees are seeking meaning and purpose and to make a difference: a portfolio career enables you to work and to give back.
• Individuals value the freedom, meaning and control that comes with self-employment: 85% of micro-business owners report they are “more creative, autonomous and satisfied in their work”.
• Women are more likely to have caring responsibilities alongside working: the ageing population means that increasing numbers of working adults have/will need to work around responsibilities, e.g. for parents with Alzheimer’s. A portfolio career enables them to do this more easily than when in full-time employment.
• People have shifted from materialist to post-materialist values: in the early 1970s there were four times as many materialists as post-materialists but by 2006 the dominant view was post-materialist.

What reasons would you add?

More blogs next about why portfolio careers are growing.