Developing a portfolio career
Changing business practices and new workplace technologies offer more opportunities to create your own work style than ever before. First defined by business guru Charles Handy, portfolio workers are fast increasing in number and scope.
For many people, portfolio work happens by chance. But with the right planning and personal marketing, you can make it happen for you. Having moved into consultancy after several years in management, Jane Gore found she was increasingly being asked to do different sorts of work related to her central expertise. “Having successfully taken on some writing and lecturing in addition to my core consultancy work, I realised that I had by default developed a work portfolio, and that I rather enjoyed it. Instead of focusing solely on my ‘proper job’, I began to develop broader interests and over the last three or four years have built up a strong portfolio which has provided both greater interest and challenge, and has helped me to develop new skills.”
Defining your skills
As Charles Handy says, “portfolio people know that most skills are saleable, if you want to sell them”. To develop an effective portfolio, you must first identify those skills and how you can use them most profitably. So, what are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? How can you expand your skills base to make yourself more marketable?
Getting started
Building a portfolio career does not happen overnight. You must work at identifying and exploiting markets for your skills. If you’re already in a full or part time job, you will probably want to develop additional portfolio work alongside this until you have created a strong enough base to take the portfolio plunge. You will need to develop a reputation for your particular kind of work, and this happens through astute marketing and networking.
Marketing yourself as a portfolio worker
Most employers will want to use a specialist in a particular field, rather than a jack-of-all-trades. So while you may have several, perhaps very diverse, strings to your bow, you must present only your relevant experience to your target employer. Maintain a portfolio of CVs to highlight different skills sets and experience. If your portfolio consists of advising companies on employment law three days a week and overseeing the running of a boarding kennel through a team of six part time staff, the big City law firm you’re targeting is not going to be too interested in knowing how many dogs you look after (but they might want to know you have practical experience of being an employer yourself). The key message is: focus each CV appropriately for the type of position you are targeting.
Doctor’s Orders
• Assess your saleable skills critically and honestly; build on what you’re good at and, equally importantly, on what you enjoy doing
• Think laterally; you can develop a portfolio based on a range of very diverse interests and skills, like the woman who spends three days a week as an HR consultant and three as a floral designer!
• Evaluate whether you’ve got the right temperament for portfolio work: if you need the security of a regular, steady income, are undisciplined and disorganised, or find it difficult to manage your time, then portfolio work is probably not for you
• Seek the help of a career coach or personal marketing professional to assist you in identifying opportunities and present your skills and experience to prospective clients most effectively
Tom Hackforth
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