‘Portfolio Career’ May Replace the Old 9-to-5 : Employment: Author forecasts rise of the multifaceted worker who goes where the action is.
William Bridges knows there are doubters, but he is certain: The traditional job, as we know it, is dying.
“The concept of the job itself is a historical artifact from the Industrial Revolution that seems to be coming to an end,” said Bridges, author, management consultant and guru to a growing number of career counselors. The end won’t come all at once, though. “It’s more like a rolling wave or a change of seasons,” he said. “It comes gradually and not everywhere at the same time--but before any of us retires, it’s going to be gone.”
What’s replacing the job, he says, is the “portfolio career.” That is less a fixed concept than a way of working, a style of employment that puts the individual’s skills and talents to work in a variety of settings. A portfolio career can be a mixture of part-time jobs, or a combination of part-time with temporary, contract, free-lance or consulting work, and even self-employment.
The upheaval in the traditional workplace over the last several years, wrought by recession, restructuring and technology, has forced both employers and employees to become more flexible.
Companies find themselves creating new categories of jobs, perhaps cutting down on permanent full-time positions and adding more temporaries, part-timers, job-sharers and outside contractors. The single-task specialist is being edged out by the multifaceted worker who gets sent to where the work is. For a growing number of workers, especially in high-unemployment California, a portfolio career has become a necessary accommodation to the realities of the job market.
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According to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the biggest job growth in recent years has come in industries that typically use more part-time workers, such as the service and retail trades. And the so-called temporary industry, although representing less than 2% of the nation’s total employment, was responsible for 11% of the increase in employment between February, 1992, and March of this year.
Bridges believes there is so little security in the 9-to-5 jobs of today that we are all temporary workers and “all jobs in today’s economy are temporary,” he writes in his latest book, “Job Shift: How to Prosper in a Workplace Without Jobs.”
“Security today comes from employability, and employability is something in you, not the job,” Bridges said in an interview from his Mill Valley, Calif., office.
Allyne Sitkoff Lewis has a portfolio career by choice. The Van Nuys resident works part time as a receptionist in a medical office and teaches at a nursery school. She likes the flexibility, she said. “Being able to work with adults and children is nice.”
And, unlike the way it was when her own children were growing up and finances were tighter, she can now set her own work pace. When she felt like slowing it down recently, she switched to substituting at the nursery school.
However, many others are forced into portfolio careers by the paucity of full-time permanent jobs in today’s economy, said Patrick Kerwin, a Pasadena career consultant who himself has a portfolio career.
“Some people [who now have portfolio careers] would rather have a full-time job that was supposedly permanent,” he said. “But I would say that a portfolio career is more secure.”
Kerwin’s work life reflects the most common kind of portfolio career--in which the individual builds several jobs around one skill, talent or knowledge base. In addition to his private practice in career counseling, Kerwin has a part-time job as a career counselor at Santa Monica College; he also teaches career planning there. And he is under contract to develop training materials for counselors in the state community college system.
His work, usually more than 40 hours a week, gives him a comfortable income, he said. With one full-time job comes insecurity, Kerwin said, because “one minus one is zero. But now if I lost a job, if I didn’t have Santa Monica College anymore, I’d still have a couple of things left. The risk is spread.”
Bridges compares employment to investing. “Just as investment counselors say it’s a mistake to invest all your money in one stock, or just in stocks, so is it a mistake to invest all your emotional security ‘money,’ or assets, in one job,” he said.
Marlene Cole, a certified public accountant, has been spreading her work assets between a part-time job and free-lancing for the last year. She works two days a week for a Palo Alto financial services company and fills in the rest of her week doing contract work.
It fits her temperament and lifestyle, she said. “In public accounting, I have a lot of different clients,” Cole said. “You’ve got to have the type of personality, that one hour you could be working on one thing and two hours later, you’re looking at completely different issues.
Keith Freadhoff, executive director of Career Planning Center in Los Angeles, thinks flexibility is important. Adults who are already well established in jobs or careers will find it harder to make the switch than tomorrow’s workers if they are properly prepared, he said.
Freadhoff predicts that 75% of high school graduates in 2010 will not go to college, but will enter a work force where “they’ll have either a portfolio career or a lot of jobs over a career.”
Many laid-off aerospace workers are already building their own portfolios of jobs, he said, because those fit employers’ needs. The aerospace engineer has “got to be a little more creative, entrepreneurial and a risk-taker.”
Although he has been a proponent of portfolio careers, Kerwin said he now believes there will always be core full-time and permanent jobs because some industries and many people are not suited to portfolio careers.
Kerwin said it will be difficult for many workers to “jump the chasm between a full-time job and a portfolio career.”
Even portfolio workers often hold onto part-time jobs that provide some benefits. But there are opportunities for job combiners to get health coverage, Kerwin said, including alumni groups and professional associations.
Consultant Bridges said society needs to find new ways to provide benefits, new formulas for qualifying for mortgages and the like.
In the meantime, however, many workers may have a hard time making the shift to non-traditional careers. “A lot of us grew up with the notion that jobs are part of God’s Creation. They aren’t. . . . We’re all going to have a lot of trouble letting go of those expectations and assumptions that were really bred into us by a job-based culture.”
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Is a Portfolio Career Right for You?
Some personality traits or values lend themselves to a portfolio career, consultant Patrick Kerwin says. He identifies some compatible and incompatible traits.
A GOOD MATCH * Time freedom: Do you like controlling your own work schedule and keeping different hours on different days?
* Independence: Would you rather determine the nature of your work, selecting and initiating the projects you take on?
* Change and Variety: Most importantly, do you need to have a lot of turnover in your work activities or to handle several activities simultaneously to stay interested?
NOT A GOOD MATCH * Stability: Do you need predictable schedules and job duties?
* Sociability: Is work your primary social environment, where you meet most of your friends and make most of your business contacts?
* Industry focus: Do you have to work in a particular industry, especially one that relies heavily on traditional jobs?
Work’s Changing Landscape
A generation ago, workers followed a rigid set of workplace rules, whereas employees today may not even have job descriptions. A look at job traits 30 years ago and today:
30 YEARS AGO
A typical job was characterized by: * Fixed position * Long-term connection * Loyalty and security * Limited job description * Limited access to information * Fixed salary * Conventional benefits (including health and pension) * Escalator-type advancement
TODAY
Jobs are more flexible and include: * Assignments * Contracts * Expectation that the employee will add value to the company * Belief that employees must do whatever needs doing * Abundant access to information * Fee payments with a share of the profits * Requirement that workers take care of their own benefits * Career journey
Source: William Bridges
Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times
