Portfolio Careerism: More than just a gig!

         

 

Buildings that stand dozens of stories high do so because their brick and mortar reflect principles of architecture successfully put to the test. Great sports and business teams flourish with unmatched cohesion not only because their members are understandably talented, but largely because sound principles of play and execution govern their behaviors and efforts as a whole. Principles are the underpinnings of thoughtful, sustaining and respected commercial creations. So it is with a sound, productive Portfolio Careerism.

Consider the following eight themes and applications as the principle reasons why  Portfolio Career Employment (PCE) ultimately distinguishes itself among better known employment and entrepreneurial models. These core principles will be woven throughout the effort you put forth to both design and implement your PCE. Others may widely call this approach to creative employment 'gig' work. PCE is that and much more.

Let’s take a look at each to appreciate how they contribute to the innovative signature of the PCE model. 

Contractorship-Centric.  Independent contractorship is widely and successfully employed across all industries of commerce. It can be either simple or complex in structure. This contract work is grounded in remuneration for pre-specified results over a pre-specified period of  time (the term of the agreement). PCE in its execution is, fundamentally, independent contractorship. You will recall from earlier stated remarks, however, that independent contractorship is not contract employment.

Vocation-Based.  For most of the employed today, their choice for work is likely determined by their level of educational preparation, proximity to home and the supply side of the job market. Career counselors widely report that workers at any level of job satisfaction, from the disenfranchised to the highly contented, routinely express the desire to ultimately find work of their “calling”. Expect to devote substantial thought to declaring and building your PCE with vocation as a significant driver when naming your core Platforms and constructing your Platform Proficiencies.

Effort Hours.   Careful attention to ‘effort hours’ characterizes the importance of time over which we expend effort in our work. Pay per hour jobs are the measure of just that. As a PCE advocate, you will either be paid per hour or a single fee with term specifications. Again, the appeal of independent contractorship is to manage effort over time against revenue earned. For example, will you choose to accept a project promising to pay $6,000 (projected effort hours – 170) or one likely to yield $2,000 (projected effort hours – 21)? In automotive speak, your wise and efficient management of effort hours is the “governor” on your employment engine.  Ultimately, be prepared to project earnings based in part on effort hours, protective of time as a co-equal to revenue. 

Stewardship.  This certainly strikes a chord with many today seeking career satisfaction.  Made popular among various religious movements and environmental causes, stewardship widely refers to taking care of something that belongs to our at large, global family. Our PCE approach customizes stewardship to include any important or vital cause, notion or principle you deem worthy of protecting and nurturing in a commercial way.  As you go about forming proficiencies for your Stewardship Platform, keep in mind how indelible an impression this is likely to impart on others who come to appreciate your devotion to this principle. Even more, expect your declared stewardship to clearly sustain the emotional and soulful integrity of your eemployment.

Professorship.  Do you have some talent, process or idea to share that showcases an expertise? Are you willing to declare these proficiencies in way that leads and inspires? PCE Professorship does not require an advanced degree or a faculty position at a renowned university. Proudly, we all have the ability to instruct and guide. Commercially develop the gifts you have that offer solutions and strategies for all who seek their promise. This represents a unique opportunity for the type of braggadocio that will be appreciated for all its possibility to change lives and advance shared learning.      

Entrepreneurship.  Who hasn’t thought of storming to the summit of the commercial world with some impressive and creative business concept?  Imagination and uncommon vision usually precede these great efforts.  In quixotic fashion, entrepreneurs dream big and set aside trepidation in favor of what might be. The trick here is to be bold but always realistic and spot-on with goals and objectives that reflect savvy understanding of the markets in question. This is, paradoxically, not the time for unbridled whimsy. As you go about forming your PCE the matter of smart business innovation and how you interpret it through the Entrepreneurship Platform Proficiencies you create will ultimately define your adroitness for the nearly impossible and uniquely extraordinary. New thinking coupled with fresh approaches is, after all, what PCE excellence should ultimately exude.

Your Life’s Work Vision™.  Setting goals, forging strategies and planning objectives is to promote the “high fly-over” forward-thinking that is both found and expected in any successful commercial venture. The PCE devotee embraces this type of thinking as a matter fundamental to the breath and scope of enterprise design and implementation.

Set fear aside for the moment and imagine without hindrance what your commercial and vocational dream might ultimately look like. Vision has no restraints; it calls us to the outer limits of possibility. Your time for paying homage to limitation and self-doubt is ended here.     

To conclude the design side (indeed, the In Principle portion) of the your PCE, your portfolio of Core Platforms and their Platform Proficiencies will descriptively name and itemize your aptitudes, competencies, products, services and programs. In all its élan, your portfolio will become Your Life’s Work Vision™ “dressed to the nines.” Your vision and its carefully demonstrated tally of  proficiencies serve not only the commercially dedicated independent contractor but also those who may otherwise be content for now to continue on with traditional at-will employment. Only now, the path to career completeness will be buffed with a vocational polish sure to inspire.  

Portfolio Careerism

1. Contractorship-Centric: An entity of one exclusively designs and predominantly provides products and services. Routinely outsources to other contractors when demand exceeds ability to supply. Single source for control and degree of risk for performance or product quality, revenue flow, effort and expenses. State-of-the-art self employment.

2. Vocation-Based: Largely blends a model of service and product delivery defined by career experience (historical) with a greater need to express talents and personal goals when pursuing a desire for commercial self-fulfillment and -characterization.

3. Network-driven: Chiefly defines the market through personal understanding and access to demand sources through a carefully executed flow of networking around, through and with commercial “firewalls”, “gatekeepers” and “friendlies”, respectively.   Actively engages business development contractors and contracts where appropriate.

4. Customized-serviceable: Supply diverse, demand accommodating.


Conventional Employment


1. Customarily employs talent-diverse, skill specific individuals as collective entity to provide products and/or services. Rarely if ever needs to outsource to contractors. Control and degree of risk for performance quality, revenue flow, effort and expenses dependent almost exclusively upon scope of staff size, abilities and commitment.

2. Largely or almost exclusively deploys employee abilities against a purely commercial needs drive to the “bottom line”. Rarely if ever defines corporate satisfaction as measured personal effort hours saved or individual goals achieved.

3. Carefully assesses a market’s potential through achievable penetration and potential revenue yield deploying conventional mass marketing tactics and sales “demand-creation” strategies .

4. Conventional practice attracting a large, one-product, one-service-fits-all customer base.

We here at the John Anthony George Foundation provide workshops live and virtually, via Zoom, exploring Portfolio Careerism, as presented in my book, An Uncommon Way Forward (Infinity Publishing, 2009), in all its possibilities. Call or text us now at 773-230-8817 to find a time to chat about how you, or those you work with or serve, can discover these wondrous truths in search of  an exciting alternative approach to career fulfillment. 

Carpe diem, friends!

Peter Willert

AUWF Podcast (Episode 1) - A Stargazer's Prologue: The Portfolio Careerist

AUWF Podcast (Episode 1) - A Stargazer's Prologue: The Portfolio Careerist (Show Notes)

(A kindly suggestion: Use your headset or earbuds for intimate, optimal audio enjoyment)

An Uncommon Way Forward, the podcast, will feature episodes where guest contributors offer their respected insights on topics of human living important to us all, from the simply must-know to the purely awe-inducing. Prepare to be informed, inspired and entertained (with a sprinkling of parody and satire at times). To all who seek their fuller and better selves, our odyssey into the world of inestimable possibility CONTINUES.

In this episode, let’s call it our launch party, I introduce you to and explore the principles and spirit of Portfolio Career Employment:  self-styled, independent work strategies that achieve multiple streams of income through carefully selected employment channels signaling pursuit of your life’s work vision and declared purpose. You are in essence what we call a Portfolio Careerist. This unique, creative employment concept is at the very core of my writing of it in my book, An Uncommon Way Forward, published in 2009, the workshops I conduct, lectures I give, mentorships I provide and will be, in part, reflected in select episodes this podcast will feature over time.  

For more on AUWF workshops, lectures, mentorships or to suggest a podcast topic or guest contributor you would like to recommend for our program, kindly email us at: breakout@ai-ltd.net, or call/text us at: 773-230-8817.

All oral and written comments heard or posted on AUWF podcasts are the views of their respective authors, whether host or podcast participant. All content on this podcast is for informational purposes only.  The host of this podcast makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information offered by its participants.  AUWF does not endorse any product or service participants may represent or recommend.  Those exhibiting  profane, hateful or disrespectful speech or views will be muted from the program. AUWF podcasts may be recorded and replayed in their entirety at the discretion of its owner. 

Return to Gethsemane

All along life's road back home we are faced with both monumental and quite ordinary moments requiring our engagement. How shall we respond? Simply put, we either stand and watch, or we commit to a response.

Beginning from the mid-1800s a rural to urban style transformation raged at many locations surrounding the outskirts of Chicago, particularly south of the city. The story of how this transformation found a now-famous caretaker in the person of Arnold Damen SJ is compelling if not for the considerable contradictions that seemed to characterize his commitment to assuring the dignity of life for immigrant Irish, Germans, Italians, Polish and Russians. Aside from providing for the spiritual and basic economic needs of an evolving community, Fr Damen expressed his dedication to its growth largely through a commitment to educational excellence. Even when faced with perilous shortages of life's most essential requirements - safe housing and adequate food and health resources - an education in both the classic sense and as expressed to meet the demands of life in the here and now, for all its challenges, accomplishments and disappointments, did not waiver.

Today, facing Roosevelt Road on Chicago's near southside a statue of Arnold Damen, SJ occupies the front lawn of St Ignatius College Prep (which adjoins his early faith and social community gathering nexus - Holy Family Parish Church). Service, Justice, Education, Faith: a compendium for all those who live out a commitment to different thinking, action not complicity, and outrage at social, political and moral transgressions.

... "The truth of the matter is the justice at stake. Every person has their Gethsemane. At any such pivotal point in one's personal history, with a heightened consciousness for the underserved or vilified among our family of man, who among us will be found asleep? Or who shall by the grace of their convictions be seen and heard, fully alive, compelled to do the right thing?" ...

Breakout with Portfolio Career Employment Principles and Strategies

What evidence can suggest that a single military operation called a "breakout” at any time or at any place in history can so compel the pace and result of a larger conflict, except that retrospection tells us otherwise, or that for many reliving an event renders it immutable as life-defining and life-directing?

What has this to do with choosing Avranches, France as a place to which we can assign, at least geographically, the very nature of Portfolio Career Employment promise, wonder and purpose?

 

                     August 1, 1944 – Avranches, France

A Europe at war found itself here "symbolically” if not technically deadlocked in the early weeks following the Allied invasion of Normandy. The successful military breakout conducted by General George Patton’s Third Army has by many accounts been assigned almost mythical status as having shortened the course of the war in Europe, thus literally saving tens of thousands of lives, on both sides. The sacrifices made by our “Greatest Generation” there (indeed, at countless other places of “ultimate sacrifice”), both in lives lost and brave efforts too staggering in number to count, often bring many of us to reflect if only as a simple measure of our gratitude. What is left but to remember, tell their stories, preserve their heroism? They are leaving us moment by moment in ever growing numbers.

Today, Portfolio Career Employment (PCE) principles and strategies remember the essence of that monumental event. PCE signals its dedication to the legacy of those participants. In the content and methodologies of such work it seeks to inspire those deadlocked in social and cultural dissonance, or steeped in uncertainty about how to express their dreams and personal goals through their life’s work, or adrift in frustration over understanding challenges to their health and well-being. Perhaps there are those who seek only simple improvement in matters of practical living. And what for those who strive for the fullest satisfaction only a "the road less traveled" can bring? To "breakout" personally, socially, professionally, intellectually, whether for self-gratification or excellence in career development, is to virtually gaze from a bluff overlooking a small French town and be reminded that effort brings honor, vision compels creativity and courage is not daunting when accompanied by hope.

Browsing through the Used Career Bin

We all have as our passion a talent or devotion to excellence that in some manner we will hope to share with another - a son, daughter, friend, student, among others. Does completion of a project or assignment as mentor seem to be, at the very least, perfection? To be sure, who can recount one's own such splendor in accomplishment without identifying a notable person of awe-inspiring influence -- a Lehrer, German for a teacher of the highest order?

"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself" a Chinese proverb

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening ..." Anatole France

"Teaching cuts right into your being; essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide". Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Of all the uncertainties we face each day none is more daunting than reflection over how I may be remembered. Fashion a legacy that brings further investigation not simple complicity. Unveil your story, your signature, your moment in the world when at least one other may see it in a way never before viewed.

When faced with the reality of perhaps never finding a place in our world that defines us, years become months, months become days, and days become fleeting moments. How shall we capture the opportunity to make a difference, to find something to stand over and profess as our own, assuring its self-expression for all to see?