Hey LinkedIn, time to celebrate the slashers!

Last Sunday I updated my LinkedIn profile, adding a job. In addition to my work as a consultant at Innate Motion, I indeed started a coaching practice, helping people put more impact, purpose and joy in their work: it’s a cool way to use my skills differently. But then within hours, I received almost a dozen (slightly worried!) messages from clients and friends asking me whether I was leaving Innate Motion, moving on, changing career... 

That was quite understandable, because they all received a notification from LinkedIn announcing that ? Benoit has a new job ?... And that "new job" appears in my profile right above my consulting position, itself above a few past positions. The small prints dates on the Innate job show I still work there, but visually it clearly suggests a sequence of jobs, résumé style...

I can’t be the only one with this issue: we are in a slasher world, no? 

For those who spent the last 5 years stuck in 1965, loads of people are now driver/teacher/musician, designer/waiter, photographer/adman, or lawyer/singer/writer. Slashers. For some, it’s an obligation, the only way to make ends meet. For many (and for me), it’s a choice - the joy of a world where we can do what we love, work in shared spaces or at home, run small ventures next to big ones, turn passions into jobs, and feel more free. 

Now, most of these people don’t show their "slashes" on their LinkedIn profiles, for reasons that I now understand... The thing is, next to my consulting and coaching jobs, I actually build a small farm in the South of France, and I gradually set-up a craft brewery with a computer engineer/brewer/inventor friend. Picture what would happen if I posted these as “new jobs” over the next few months: the perplexity of my Chinese clients figuring that after a month of coaching, I now moved on to farming, before going on to sell beer... 

This is sad, because slash positions can seriously enrich each other. 

My brewer friend puts the full knack of his IT logic at the service of methodically fine-tuning the bitterness of his IPA, and the creative side he cultivates in craft beer makes him a much better engineer. I know a brand consultant whose activities as a poet help combine magic and logic in ways no one-job planner can beat. On my side, the knowledge I developed about organic and permaculture farming is invaluable in the work I do with my consulting clients in the food industry. To a 1988 head-hunter, my various work activities may look non-sensical. But to the people I work with in each of these activities, they are the mark of an open mind, creatively combining a view of work as something that can contribute to a better world, with a hunger to learn and live with passion. They make me a better, richer, more competent human being.

Slashers are not new. As my colleague Bonnie puts it, the first slasher was called the Renaissance Man. But a good two-hundred years of industrial revolution have erased that culture, and it’s quite natural that many of my friends still think of jobs as things that come in sequence. So LinkedIn, I need a hand there, a visual device, an infographic career visualizer, something! But a tool that helps slashers stage the beauty of their work lives, their richer, non-linear, creative nature. So we can all connect professionally as the fuller, multi-faceted work people we are, not as the one-job man or women that our parents were.