Create a Career Portfolio (Not a Career Path)

Author: April Rinne

Every four years or so, something inside me shifts. I get restless and want to learn something new or apply my skills in a new way. It’s as though I shed a professional skin and start over, fresh.

In my twenties, I got all kinds of flak for this. When I decided to guide hiking trips rather than join a consulting firm, my peers said that my résumé made no sense. When I opted to defer graduate school to travel in India, my mentors questioned my seriousness and said my professional future could crash.

I felt like something was wrong with me because I was interested in so many things while my friends were laser-focused on climbing the corporate ladder. It’s not that I wasn’t disciplined or willing to work hard. There was just too much worth learning and doing. To settle on one pursuit seemed like a mistake.

Today, the world has changed in some amazing and profound ways. Broadening your career focus and professional identity is no longer seen as a negative. It’s celebrated. The macro forces driving the future of work demand independent and adaptable thinkers. As you start to think about your career, or continue to develop it, try stepping away from the idea of it needing to be a path, and start thinking of it as a portfolio instead.

What Is a Career Portfolio?

A career portfolio is a different way to think about, talk about, and—most important—craft your professional future in order to navigate our ever-changing world of work with purpose, clarity, and flexibility.

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 represents your vast and diverse professional journey (including the various twists and turns made by choice or by circumstance).

My portfolio, as an example, includes author, speaker, futurist, adviser, lawyer, hiking guide, global development executive, investor, and yoga practitioner. Each of these identities took time to develop. Some of them included traditional jobs, while others meant self-employment, pro bono work, and sweat equity investments. Many are roles I’ve been in simultaneously and longer than my usual four-year stint, though my periodic urge to add another to the list continues unabated.

As you begin to build your own portfolio, you don’t have to have everything figured out. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. That’s the beauty of a portfolio. Because it’s not focused on a singular end, it gives you more space—and frankly, more wisdom—to test out different things and find your way.

How Do I Build a Career Portfolio?

The first thing to remember is: You already have a career portfolio—even if you don’t realize it, and even if you’ve never had a paid job. Start by identifying what’s in it.

While your portfolio can include traditional paid jobs, don’t limit yourself. Think bigger. Your portfolio is created by you, rather than determined for you by someone else (like a bunch of hiring managers). It reflects your professional identity and potential. It includes your unique combination of skills, experiences, and talents that can be mixed, matched, and blended in different ways.

If you’ve helped care for your siblings, led a team of online gamers, or done community outreach, include these activities in your portfolio. In fact, include any role or activity in which you’ve created value and served others: freelance roles, volunteering, community service, side hustles, passion projects, hobbies, exchanges, parenting, supporting your family and friends, and so on.

Your portfolio should also include experiences and capabilities that are customarily left off your résumé, yet fundamental to who you are. For example, my status as an orphan, globetrotter, insatiable handstander, and mental-health advocate are all essential components of my portfolio. These identities help power the work that I do.

How you keep track of your portfolio is a matter of personal preference. I suggest creating a simple list to start. But because the real value of your portfolio is in its diversity, you’ll want to make connections between the things that are in it.

Personally, I draw my portfolio: It looks like a network with many different nodes. As I add new skills, roles, or experiences, I add those elements to my drawing.

What Are the Benefits of a Career Portfolio?

Practically speaking, a career portfolio typically leads to greater ownership of your career, because unlike a job that someone else gives you (and determines the scope of, and whether you will advance), a portfolio can’t simply be taken away. It is yours forever.

Similarly, a career portfolio gives you a unique professional identity that evolves alongside you (and isn’t roiled to the core if you lose a job, shift gears, or even start over from time to time). It’s naturally aligned with lifelong learning and meant to help you expand your professional community and access to leadership opportunities. Consider your portfolio part of your strategy to be “un-automatable,” too.

Over time, the value of your portfolio will increase by your ability to cross-pollinate: to combine and weave together skills from your different experiences in order to gain new insights, tackle new problems, diversify income sources, and serve in new ways.

In a world of uncertainty, people who can expand their thinking beyond boxes, silos, or sectors will be in demand. Those who make an effort to build a career portfolio now will be more prepared to pitch themselves for (and even create) new opportunities, as they will be well-practiced at making creative connections between their various skills and the skills required of the jobs they most wish to pursue.

How Do I Use My Portfolio to Land the Roles I Want?

It’s key to be clear about how your portfolio enables you to be proactive, to learn, and to contribute in ways that a traditional career path would not. I call this your portfolio narrative.

Employers are hungry to hire talent with nontraditional backgrounds, but they often need help. Your portfolio narrative is the link—it is the story you tell to make connections between the skills people are hiring for and the skills you have developed through the breadth of your experience.

For example, when I was a hiking and biking guide, some people said my career looked frivolous (or even like “too much fun”). What they didn’t see was that as a guide, not only was I usually working 18-hour days—first up and last to bed—but I was also learning how to project manage, accommodate differences, balance budgets, build teams, ensure safety, forge lifetime friendships, and spark joy. I didn’t have a fancy title or earn very much, but I got a practical mini-MBA on the trail and perspective that would shape the rest of my life.

Often, I’ve had to fill in these gaps for others. Being able to explain why my experience was valuable in this way didn’t just shape my portfolio—it helped me stand out from other candidates when I applied for jobs.

Telling a good portfolio narrative requires understanding how the different things in your portfolio enhance one another. How does your combination of skills give you an edge? I like to think of this as “1 + 1 = 11”: Your combination of skills is far more valuable than any of them on their own. When answering interview questions, for instance, share a story about how you applied skills you learned in two very different settings to solve one specific problem.

The future of work is full of uncertainty. It’s hard to know what to do or to trust that things will work out. But taking ownership of your portfolio is something that you can control, and you can start today. Your future will thank you.