PROTAGION
  • Proteges
    • Now What?
    • Career Support Guide
    • Career Goals >
      • Promotion / Raise
      • New Skills
      • Further Qualifications
      • Moving Countries
      • Switching: Consult/Contract/Startup
      • Transition: Specialism/Profession
      • Managing a Business
      • Portfolio Career
      • Purpose & Meaning
      • CPD
      • (Conference 1-5 Mar '21)
    • Example Professions >
      • Accounting
      • Actuarial
      • Asset & Investment Management
      • Risk Management
      • And more... >
        • Talent Management for Professionals
    • Our Services
    • Courses
  • Mentors
    • Encore Mentor
    • Featured Subset >
      • Anne - Australia
      • Boniswa - S Africa
      • Bradley - UK
      • Hafsa - S Africa
      • Lee - Hong Kong
      • Lusani - S Africa
      • Margaret - S Africa
      • Michael - S Africa
      • Natasha - UK
      • Nikki - UK
      • Sumit - India
      • Trevor - UK
      • And More on our Protege Platform...
  • Subscribe
  • Platform Login
    • Login
    • Sign Up: Free
  • Stories
    • Our Stories & Articles
    • Our Principles
    • Books
We help professionals achieve their career goals
OUR STORIES
Over 150 career-related articles and counting... Scroll down to read
NEED MORE CAREER SUPPORT? Our professional mentors & coaches are here to help
Join our in-a-group facilitated sessions & explore your career questions with us​
SUBSCRIBE TO JOIN OUR
IN-A-GROUP SESSIONS

Portfolio Careers: Cultivating Multiple Income Streams

20/3/2019

0 Comments

 
This Protagion post focuses on a TEDx talk given by Dorie Clark at an event titled “Professions of the Future” in Switzerland in September 2017. The talk explores portfolio careers, a topic we briefly touched on in a previous Halloween-themed post about slashers: people who do different concurrent jobs.
Dorie herself has “consciously and deliberately worked to cultivate multiple income streams”. The New York Times describes her as an “expert at self-reinvention”, and her roles include:
  • teaching at business schools
  • author of books like Stand Out*, Entrepreneurial You*, and Reinventing You*
  • blogger, including for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur and Time Magazine
  • speaker, including a number of TEDx talks
  • executive coach
  • marketing strategy consultant
She’s also directed an environmental documentary film, and was a producer for a multiple-Grammy-winning jazz album.
Through that process [of building a portfolio career], it’s done a lot of things: it’s brought in more revenue for me, it’s mitigated my risk, it’s introduced me to new people and new experiences, it’s helped me develop new skills. And it’s my hope for you, whether you work for yourself, or if you have a day job that you love and want to keep, that if you cultivate a portfolio career, that it could do the same for you.”
DORIE CLARK
​Her talks often use personal stories of people she’s interviewed to illustrate her suggestions, which makes them relatable and easier to remember. Read more to view the video, some takeaways, and additional insights from Dorie.
​This talk begins with Dorie describing her own experience of being retrenched. On 10th September 2001, she was laid off from her journalism job as a newspaper reporter in Boston, spurring her to action: “…I was never going to let myself become that vulnerable, in such a precarious position again… These days I earn money in a variety of different ways: I write books, I’m a professor, I speak, I consult.”

She shares five tips to prepare ourselves to future-proof our careers:
1) Take the Initiative – she illustrates this suggestion with a story of a nurse who became a hospital’s Communications Director because he followed his passion for technology and innovation by developing apps outside of work. 
When you are willing to invest in yourself and your continued learning, you can push your career into places you never would have even thought possible”
DORIE CLARK
2) Apply What You’ve Learned – Dorie tells a story of using learnings from one failed entrepreneurial venture to improve on the next one, and to reinvest this additional knowledge into your employer too: “An intrapreneur brings the knowledge and learnings from outside side ventures back into their company and that makes them even more successful and more valuable”.

3) Ask for What You Want – Dorie’s next vignette also centres on turning a passion into a new career by going after what you want. She describes how an aspiring chef wrote personal letters to the top chefs in her city rather than merely applying for advertised roles, and how this ultimately led to her owning three bakeries and a restaurant.

4) Focus on the Small Wins – this personal story underscores the importance of savouring successes which helps boost your energy to keep going.

5) Rethink the Impossible – her fifth illustration about sponsorship income from podcasts shows how challenging implicit assumptions can prompt new opportunities and help us to future-proof our careers. 
Cultivating a portfolio career has a number of benefits:
  • New skills, including insights from different disciplines (which can boost innovation and creativity)
  • Opportunities for more revenue
  • More job security and mitigation of risk through diversification
  • Additional life options available
Additional insights from Dorie
Warning about the dangers of relying on one income stream, Dorie has said: “It is rather perilous… whether that is just a day job, or even if you're self-employed, doing one type of thing for your clients. If you really want to be able to mitigate risk, and also dramatically increase your ability to earn more money, seeking out proactively multiple income streams and how to strategically develop that for your business can be transformative. And if you do it the right way, each way that you earn money actually helps you earn even more money because it brings in new clients who want different things from you at different price points. It enables you to reach larger and larger audiences who might create essentially cross-selling and cross-promotional opportunities.”
Picture
To build additional income streams, Dorie suggests offering different things to an existing or similar audience, rather than appealing to a totally different market. She also advises nurturing an entrepreneurial side venture while you have a day job: “Incubate it. Test it. And then, only then when you have validation that it is going well, that you can pursue it and start to spend more time on it… It really de-risks the enterprise. You're able to make a lot of mistakes where it's not going to cripple you. Because you have your job to fall back on.”

And, to end off, a rallying cry from a Finding Brave podcast conversation between Dorie and Kathy Caprino about how corporations “desperately” want us to shape our future careers. “[My corporate speaking clients say:] We really want our employees to take control of their careers. So many employees are just waiting for something to happen. They're waiting to be promoted. They're waiting for the next thing. And it's not necessarily as clear as it used to be. We want the employees to say, ‘Hey, here's where I'm aiming. Here's where I want to go. What are the skills that I need to develop to get there? What are the assignments that I need in between now and then to be able to get to be an SVP or whatever it is?’ We want them to do it.”
* PROTAGION is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk. The links with * participate in this programme.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.


    Follow @Protagion

    Author

    Bradley Shearer
    ​Founder of Protagion
    My Personal Journey
    I'd love to hear your stories

    SHARE YOUR
    STORY WITH ME

    Categories

    All
    Active Career Management
    Branching Out
    Connection
    Consulting
    Contracting
    Future Of Work
    Inspiration
    Leadership
    Learning
    Mentoring
    Non Executive Directors (NEDs)
    Personal Journeys
    Professions
    Psychology
    Real Life Examples
    Role Options
    Routes To The Top

    Tweets by protagion

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017

    RSS Feed

"NOW WHAT?" - a common question our visitors ask...
​WE CAN HELP!
Examples of common career goals, with resources for each: promotion, new skills, further study/qualifications, moving countries, switching into consulting / contracting / startup, transition to new specialism or profession, managing a business, portfolio career, purpose & meaning, CPD, and more... 


Follow @Protagion
Home / Proteges
> ​Services
> Subscribe
> CPD
​​

​Mentors

Our Stories / Blog

Sign Up to use our System
​
​
Privacy Policy​
Career Development and Talent Management for professionals: accountants, actuaries, analysts, asset managers, bankers, CFAs, data scientists, engineers, investment managers, risk managers, and more...
Protagion currently offers services in English, although some of our mentors & coaches speak other languages too. ​Please email us if you have any questions.
Picture

​© 2017-2023 PROTAGION LIMITED (10721032) is a company registered in England and Wales.
Registered Address: 128 City Road, London, United Kingdom, EC1V 2NX
Photos used under Creative Commons from Pjposullivan1, paul.horsefield, flazingo_photos
  • Proteges
    • Now What?
    • Career Support Guide
    • Career Goals >
      • Promotion / Raise
      • New Skills
      • Further Qualifications
      • Moving Countries
      • Switching: Consult/Contract/Startup
      • Transition: Specialism/Profession
      • Managing a Business
      • Portfolio Career
      • Purpose & Meaning
      • CPD
      • (Conference 1-5 Mar '21)
    • Example Professions >
      • Accounting
      • Actuarial
      • Asset & Investment Management
      • Risk Management
      • And more... >
        • Talent Management for Professionals
    • Our Services
    • Courses
  • Mentors
    • Encore Mentor
    • Featured Subset >
      • Anne - Australia
      • Boniswa - S Africa
      • Bradley - UK
      • Hafsa - S Africa
      • Lee - Hong Kong
      • Lusani - S Africa
      • Margaret - S Africa
      • Michael - S Africa
      • Natasha - UK
      • Nikki - UK
      • Sumit - India
      • Trevor - UK
      • And More on our Protege Platform...
  • Subscribe
  • Platform Login
    • Login
    • Sign Up: Free
  • Stories
    • Our Stories & Articles
    • Our Principles
    • Books