Jack of all trades?

I’ve worked my way through a fair few jobs in many different fields in my career so far and i’m more than certain i’ll be adding a few more before my time is up….. 

What i’ve always found amusing is the reaction to my list of occupations when i’m occasionally asked what I’ve done.  Generally they vary from horror -  “do you just not know what you want to do yet? - to shock (disguised as vague interest) - to “that’s very cool to be able to earn a living in different ways - good for you”.

So this is why this article in the Times last week has some resonance with me - “Cafe owner/set-builder/festival organiser: Welcome to generation forward slash…”

“To young people entering the workforce now is to enter a slasher career”, says the article.

When I left university I remember feeling a total loser because of my lack of clarity on the issue. Yes I could speak pretty fluent French and Spanish but now what?

There was no positive spin on freelancing as there is now i.e. “self-employed and independent worker”. No google searches giving you the top 10 ways to make money through part-time jobs. Instead if you “temped” for a bit (pretty much exactly the same as independent worker)  you were certainly labelled as “unemployed but just hiding it and unable to secure proper work”.

It’s a good thing times have caught up now and many young people entering the workforce are clued up enough not to hunt for those illusive jobs for life.

Self-employed and independent workers can call themselves entrepreneurs or start-ups and if the A jobs which they really love and would love to lead to full-time jobs don’t work out, then they’ve got the B, bread and butter jobs to fall back on.

Makes perfect sense to me.

There is a part of me though that longs to be a master of something; an expert in a certain field and not to dabble vicariously, often because needs-must, between different assignments and projects adding forward slash after forward slash.

Of course this 24/7 way of working isn’t for everyone but at least when you’re constantly on the look out for new opportunites and new projects the odds are with you on developing an expertise….well that’s what I keep telling myself…….Portfolio worker. I love my new job title :)