The Future Belongs now to Multi-Disciplinary Professionals – the Importance of Your Career Portfolio

“What do you do?” - After, the question, “where you are from”, this professional-oriented question is the most common question in any networking session, although most of us including myself have a hard time answering this – not because we dont have an answer, but the different versions of how to answer it that justifies our current professional reality – that most of us in this new digital century do not just have one professional job, but one, two or three different gigs that we are concurrently juggling. At the same time, a lot of us don’t want the “job” to define us as a human being, as a person – with passions well beyond the job alone. I myself have different dimensions to myself – a Managing Director at a large financial services firm, a husband and father of two boys, a venture adviser to impact enterprises, a social innovator and an aspiring author and blogger.

A saying that our parent’s used to tell us when we were children is not to be a “jack of all trades and a master of none.” For the longest time I have been giving career talks to professionals young and old, I always get asked about what my opinion is on the part-time job, the extra work or what is now called the “side hustle.” This somewhat controversial topic lingers in people mind not because people don’t do it, in fact according to Bankrate.com, about 4 out of 10 Americans are engaged in one, but because society’s way to frown upon folks who do not focus or specialize in one thing alone. Why was our mind primed to be ashamed or shame people who work 8-10 hours a day, then work an extra 4-6 hours on another passion project? My theory is that current society’s norm is based on the old industrial revolution - where highly specialized skills were how people define themselves day in and day out – and that long hours prevented people from doing something else besides family and work. Another theory of mine is the way that middle class societies force people to the median – so that folks don’t “mess it up for everyone,” people must try to all gravitate towards the average.

The new digital century that we all live in now requires a different kind of mindset – the one that embraces variety vs. specialization, the connector rather than the vertical, the one that can simplify and deal with complexity rather than to run away from it. The new leaders that grew up in the digital world should and must be able to learn new disciplines quickly and to be able to draw from a very diverse and rich experience set to tackle problems that interrelate among each other. My current role is a good example of this – I am currently in new role that is called the digital catalyst role – a new job that needs to be part ambassador, part technology and venture capitalist and part strategy consultant, where you need to tie in your people skills to understand the problems of the business, apply strategic frameworks, bring in best practices from other industries and apply new technologies to solve the problems of the business. This type of interdisciplinary roles will just continue to grow in demand and accelerate over the next decade and it is important to grow leaders that can thrive in these types of “connector” roles that never existed before as companies grapple with the new realities that technology disruptions could bring.

For this, I give a framework to explore your career portfolio, and my advice is to have something at every box of this quadrant at any given time in your career and evaluate every year if this is still the right mix for you.

1.     The Safe Choice – most of us are here, and some of us will even stay here forever. This is what you have prepared for in college or even when you were young. You default to previous experience and past situations to make decisions at work and to decide if you want to accept the work. This is what our parents call the stable path. This is why a lot of friends of ours are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and health care professionals even if some don’t really want it. The goal here is to hone your craft to make sure that you dont become obsolete soon.

2.     The Logical Progression – This is where you build upon your skills and do something close to it. Maybe its going to take a graduate degree to increase your pay, or maybe its to take more responsibility in the same department in order to succeed, or even at the fundamental student level, maybe if someone was good in biology in high school, maybe it makes sense to encourage to go to med school or sciences.

3.     The Stretch goal – this is the current evening and weekend hustle. The are there areas that you see today that you aren’t an expert in that you would like to learn and explore. Some might want to try out a new career path, like my friends that might be engineers at day, but financial planners at night, or someone who is engineer in the morning, and public speaker at nights and weekends. This could be owning a restaurant, kiosk or e-commerce store and doing it part-time. This is the one that people might be willing to pay you in the short-term as well. The goal of this is quadrant is to be able to learn new skills and get exposed new thinking.

4.     The What if Scenario is what I call the career moonshot or career trajectory game changers. What do I mean by that, its placing your bets on a future that might be coming and being ready for it. A good example of this is starting an entrepreneurial venture on the side for areas that you feel passionate about, but not sure if it will pan out. My opinion is to try to test out your hypothesis before shifting the buckets. This quadrant could be the basis of a brand new career for you.

If the goal is to create a portfolio, it is important that you strive to have an answer to each of the quadrants at every single point of your career and evaluated probably every 6 months. So I am challenging the readers of this note today, how is your career portfolio looking like? The next time someone asks you "what do you do?," don't be ashamed to say four things at the same time.

About the Author:

Earl is a venture advisor and corporation innovation leader specializing in early stage product development and transformation. He is currently a Managing Director for Digital Transformation at a large financial services firm in San Francisco and has advised hundreds of start-up companies in his career. He is a Stanford MBA graduate, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and recognized as one of The Ten Most Outstanding Young Men and Women (TOYM) of the Philippines. Find out more about Earl at earlvalencia.com.