The Power of the Portfolio Career for Women

This article originally featured on IMAGE.ie

Several roles can come together in one career of your own design. For a growing number of women, the portfolio career is a considered response to a working world that was never built around them. Career and return-to-work coach Sorcha Keogh explores the power of portfolio careers for modern women.

Who doesn’t love a buffet breakfast? A little bit of this, a little bit of that, going back for second helpings.

Historically, workers have been encouraged to choose a single, stable, permanent and pensionable job for life. Given what modern parents, and particularly modern women, are navigating, perhaps there is another way of looking at our careers.

A portfolio career takes the buffet approach. Instead of holding one job, you hold several roles and income streams at once, whether all year round or season by season. A portfolio can encompass consultancy work, part-time or fractional roles, tutoring, writing, holding a board seat or running a business of your own.

It’s by no means an easier option than holding one steady role, and for some people it will be too much. But when it’s done well, a portfolio career can be one of the most deliberate career choices a woman can make. It’s important for us to normalise working options beyond the nine-to-five status quo that is prohibitive and restrictive for so many. The nine-to-five can feel like an all-or-nothing approach to work, whereas a portfolio gives women the scope to pick and choose and to build a career that fits around their life rather than the other way around.

Why women, and why now?

There are now almost 90 per cent more women in employment in Ireland than there were in the year 2000. Women and mothers are, whether through choice or necessity, working in the traditional labour market as well as raising their children and running their households. There are also caring obligations pulling in the opposite direction, as our ageing population lives longer and can have growing care needs.

Then there’s our biology. Our hormones fluctuate not just monthly but across our lifetimes, and many women also face fertility struggles, perimenopause, menopause and several other realities that are simply outside of their control.

The standard nine-to-five assumes all of this fluctuating reality away. Whether it’s childcare, healthcare, emergencies, or otherwise, women’s lives can’t always fit neatly around set working hours five days a week, or more in certain industries.

One way for women to reclaim some control is to explore a portfolio career. What can you do in the time you do have available? Can you maintain your place in the traditional labour market on a part-time basis during a chaotic or caring season of your life, and supplement it with something you can work around? Plenty of women already do the first part: women account for two-thirds of all part-time workers in Ireland.

It isn’t always easy, but thinking outside the box and looking for work that flexes to suit you is also a way for women to honour themselves. Women often have multiple interests, talents and skills. We need not commit to one singular thing, and we need to learn to lean into capitalising on, and potentially monetising, our natural strengths.

We often pride ourselves on our ability to juggle, but we’re usually juggling on others’ terms. A portfolio career is a way of juggling on our own.

The case for not putting all your eggs in one employer

We tend to think of one full-time permanent job as the safe option. But consider how much of family life in Ireland is now built on two salaries: the mortgage, the rent, the childcare, the car. Then consider what happens when one of those salaries rests on a single employer’s restructuring plan. Redundancy doesn’t give notice to your household budget.

It’s hard to foresee what work will look like even ten years from now. A portfolio spreads that risk. If one stream dries up, the others keep flowing and you’ve already got the network and reputation to find the next one.

That matters all the more when you look at the financial picture for women. The national gender pay gap sits at around 9.6 per cent, and research from Maynooth University found women’s earnings fall by 27 per cent immediately after childbirth. Several income streams won’t close that gap on their own, but they give you something just as valuable: a route to financial independence that doesn’t depend on one organisation deciding what you’re worth.

Your network is your future-proofing

As AI and technology absorb more of the routine work, the things that can’t be automated become more valuable: judgement, empathy, relationships, the ability to read a room. Humanity is going to be a premium skill.

A portfolio career builds invaluable human skills. Every role brings new people, new sectors and new ways of seeing a problem. The professional who also sits on a charity board and lectures one evening a week has three networks, three perspectives and three sets of people who know what she can do. It’s a way of staying broad-minded and agile in a world that is changing so quickly.

Careers for a season

There’s a well-known saying about friendship: people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. The same can be true of career opportunities.

Our working lives are getting longer and the goalposts at the end keep moving. Few of us will have one career across 45 or 50 years, and fewer still will want to.

A portfolio lets you think in seasons. There might be a season where most of your energy goes into small children or an ageing parent, and work is a smaller slice of the plate. There might be a season where you go all in on building something. The crucial thing is keeping a foot in. Staying present in the workforce, full-time or not, keeps your skills current, your confidence intact and your name in the right conversations. It is so much easier to turn up the dial on work you’ve kept alive than to restart from zero after time away.

It’s also a chance to follow the things that don’t fit neatly in a job description. The accountant with an eye for interiors. The solicitor who wants to teach. The marketer who’s quietly brilliant at pottery. And for many people, particularly in corporate settings, a portfolio is how they find a sense of mission that their day job doesn’t give them.

So how do you actually build one?

As women, we are powerful beyond belief. But the fear and self-doubt so many of us have learned, along with our instinct to protect ourselves and others, can sometimes hold us back from exploring a less trodden path.

So how do you take the first step? Honestly, with patience, some risk, and keeping your eyes and ears open for potential opportunities around you. Most portfolio careers start with a single move: dropping to part-time hours, taking on a consultancy project, or saying yes to a speaking or writing opportunity alongside the day job. The growth of fractional roles, particularly in HR, finance and tech, has opened up real, well-paid options for experienced professionals who want senior work without the full-time commitment.

From there, it’s about mapping out your week with intention. What earns the money? What builds your reputation? What feeds your sense of purpose? The practice of your craft sits alongside the speaking, the writing, the board work and the networking that bring in the next opportunity. Yes, sometimes that means evenings and weekends and you need to be honest with yourself about how much of that you want.

The juggle is real

Managing a portfolio career definitely isn’t straightforward. There’s tax to get your head around, the administration of multiple contracts, the uncertainty of variable income and the ever-present risk that a portfolio turns into multiple full-time jobs. Boundaries matter and it is absolutely crucial to implement them to protect your own energy, health and wellbeing.

Though they can be tricky to manage initially, with planning, a portfolio can give you more control, more resilience and, frankly, more joy and fulfillment than a traditional job you’d have otherwise.

Where the real power lies

The quiet power of the portfolio career is this: every woman who builds one exposes how archaic the rigid model has become. For too long, the working world has told women that something has to give, and it’s usually been us. When women claim autonomy over how, when and where they work, the question shifts from “why can’t she commit?” to “why is the system so inflexible in the first place?”

In the absence of the wider world flexing, let’s craft our own. Let’s keep our place in the workforce, on our terms, and keep climbing towards the positions of leadership and decision-making where we can genuinely reshape what work looks like for the women coming after us.

A portfolio career might not be right for you now. It might be something for five or ten years down the line. But the mindset behind it, a willingness to build, adapt and curate a career that responds to change rather than breaking under it, is valuable no matter what your working life looks like.

To the buffet, ladies.

Sorcha is the founder and lead coach at Clarico, a coaching, training and support service for employees and employers navigating life’s key transitions. Clarico offers individual career and return-to-work coaching. They also partner with employers to craft practical employee support solutions.