Why You Should Design a Career Portfolio Instead of a Career Path

It was an otherwise mundane day when a close friend sent an article to a mutual friend group we're part of on WhatsApp. The stream of links I receive via the green app every day is endless but it’s a good thing I decided to open this one.

In the Harvard Business Review article, April Rinne, a "change navigator," answers one of the biggest questions I've had nagging at me since I was aware I'd need to one day get a job and follow one career till the day I die.

What about all my other interests?

Were they doomed to die an uneventful death as I single-mindedly stomped my way to a fulfilling career? There's an inherent restlessness that runs through my veins. Like a bird, my brain perches on different topics often enough to give me whiplash. I’m a journalist, a Master’s student, traveler, hiker, blogger, YouTuber, amateur designer, fiction writer and a few more titles that my imposter syndrome won’t let me type out for now.

That’s a lot. But it occurred to me that there had to be a good side to this. A way I could monetize or benefit from my erratic mind. It turns out there is.

What is a career portfolio?

Of course, after discovering the term “career portfolio,” I did my research and went down the rabbit hole. Simply put, a career portfolio is an all-encompassing way of marking your different professional skills, experiences and pursuits. The first thing was to learn how it differed from a standard career path and I like how Rinne put it: “Whereas a career path tends to be a singular pursuit (climb the ladder in one direction and focus on what is straight ahead), a career portfolio is a never-ending source of discovery and fulfillment. It represents your vast and diverse professional journey, including the various twists and turns, whether made by choice or by circumstance.”

When you hear the word portfolio, you might be reminded of work portfolios. If you’re a journalist like me, that means samples of the stories you’ve written which can be housed neatly online with tools such as Muck Rack. If you’re an artist, it means a sample of the artwork you’ve produced for different projects using a program such as Behance.

But one thing Muck Rack or Behance can’t do for you is link all your lines of work together. What if you’re an artist and a potter? Or a journalist and a scriptwriter? That’s how you can start thinking about career portfolios. They are meant to be more all-encompassing. Almost like a map of your life and anything in it that could be useful in a work or school environment. And it doesn’t have to be big professional accomplishments alone. Like my friend who shared the article with me said, even the fact that she’d helped take care of her younger siblings helped with her job as an administrator at a school.

As I read more about building a career portfolio, it reminded me of the iterative process used in the tech world. I worked closely with tech workers for about 3 years, and the biggest behind-the-scenes information I got was that how a product started could be leagues different from how it turned out — and in all those stages of iteration, something new was learned.

How the iterative process can help you envision your career portfolio

To confirm my suspicions, I talked to Tyra Hans, a product designer at Mideva Labs. She’s worked in UI and UX for 3 years. She told me about an e-commerce mobile app project she worked on recently and described the 4 phases she and her team took to complete it.

The first was to empathize, aka putting themselves in the shoppers' shoes. “This phase involved gaining a deep understanding of the target audience's needs, desires and frustrations while shopping online,” Hans told The Org.

The next thing was to define what the team found out from all the research and interviews they had carried out. “We came up with about 8 key insights and were able to come up with a comprehensive problem statement,” Hans said.

But that wasn’t it, because even if the team moved on to the ideation phase, they had to go back to the empathy phase in order to answer questions such as, “What gaps are still present? What ideas can we adopt, locally and globally? What problems are not being met?”

Afterwards, Hans’ team got to the prototype and testing phase, in which they got to produce the actual designs. “At this point, we had more convergent research as opposed to the divergent research we did at the empathy and ideate phases. We had participant criteria that helped us narrow our focus to reach people who fit the target audience description,” Hans said.

As we spoke I couldn’t help but to draw parallels. To start thinking about a career portfolio, I needed to start by thinking about what I wanted to do and narrow it down. Then I had to define how I’d like my life to go based on those interests. Which ones did I want to prioritize? Then I had to ideate on the possible links I could make between my different interests.

As for prototypes and testing, that is a lifelong process.

How does designing a career portfolio actually work?

To help me start visualizing my career portfolio I immediately popped onto data visualization and storytelling software Flourish to start mapping it all out.

This is an ongoing process and will likely never end. As your life evolves different activities may take precedence over others while some may fall by the wayside. But as long as you are able to keep forming those connections and allowing your different interests, skills and talents to feed into each other, you may just discover that you are able to live a more adventurous lifestyle.