Portfolio Career (n.): ‘working style where you combine multiple streams of income—often creating a mix of full or part-time employment, freelancing or working as a consultant.‘
– Caroline Castrillon writing for Forbes.
Twice a year for the past seven years I’ve had the treat of spending time with our distance learning PhD researchers from arts & humanities subjects. They come from across the world with rich professional, academic, and personal experiences, often looking to use their PhDs to turn their passions into professional pursuits.
Always high on the agenda when I meet this lovely lot are portfolio careers. And why shouldn’t they be… if you’re an established professional and want to use your PhD to add extra strings to your career bow, this can be an exciting way to branch out. What I’ve rapidly realised, however, is that some of the more common options for using your research to expand an existing portfolio career can also be useful for many PhD researchers. In fact, whatever your plans (or, lack of) might be, thinking about how you can use your PhD to ‘branch out’ like this can be useful for a range of reasons, including:
- Diversifying your income streams: turn your PhD into one or more ways to make money, both to supplement your current income and to have potential options to ‘fall back on’ if you end up with an employment gap post-PhD.
- Trying out using different skills and bits of yourself in different contexts, to give you clues about what you enjoy.
- Mixing up your experience, giving you tangible evidence that you haven’t just hidden in a library or a lab for 4+ years.
- Using your research to make a difference to others and to build evidence that your work has had an impact beyond the academy: something of increasing importance for building an academic career.
That sounds great, you might think… but how on earth do you get started on thinking what ‘branching out’ could look like for you? What are some of the main ways that you can ‘use’ your PhD to add to an existing portfolio career, or to kick start a portfolio career during your PhD? Well, based on the many conversations I’ve had with doctoral researchers on this very topic, I’ve come up with a (very) basic three-part exercise that you can use to get started.
I tried to think of a fancier name for it but failed miserably, so I’m going with calling it:
Teach It – Consult It – Represent It.
Let’s take each of the three parts individually to explore this further.
1) Teach It.
If you’ve been developing knowledge and expertise in a specific field, then an obvious way to turn that into part of a portfolio career or an income stream is by using this knowledge and expertise to teach, train, or develop others in some way. Obvious options here include things like:
- Part-time teaching opportunities, such as teaching assistant, teaching fellow, visiting lecturer, ‘adjunct’ teaching or other such roles, where you teach your academic subject area.
- Or, slightly less obvious ‘fringe teaching’ – for example, teaching in a university’s maths skills centre, academic skills centre, or other centre or department that covers more ‘foundation’ skills or areas.
However, ‘Teach It’ doesn’t have mean using the knowledge developed through your PhD to teach in a university or other traditional ‘classroom’ setting. Here are some other examples of ‘Teach It’ that might be applicable to your research:
- Outreach and public engagement. As we saw last year when we heard from PhD graduate Katrina Roberts , various initiatives and pots of money might make turning your research into outreach and public engagement activities, resources, or other interventions one possible way to ‘branch out’ and try something new.
- Training other professionals. Could findings from your research be used to help inform or upskill a certain group of people? Perhaps those in a particular profession, or those working with specific populations? Examples here could include the lawyer whose research on birth trauma cases leads to working with a charity to train healthcare staff to deal sensitively with patients who have had traumatic births. Another could be the PhD-qualified clinician who applies their expertise to editing and creating content for a CPD-based journal for doctors. Have a think about who your ‘end users’ could be in this respect: whose practice or approach could be enhanced through insights from your own work, and how you can reach these users, be it through training interventions, professional development publications, professional associations, or otherwise.
2. Consult It.
Being a ‘consultant’ can sound somewhat nebulous, but ultimately it means offering advice and services to some kind of client group which that client group can’t provide for itself. Perhaps the client group don’t have the knowledge or the expertise needed, the time and resources to do a certain type of work, or both. That’s where you come in, using your expertise to help ‘clients’ to solve problems they can’t solve by themselves.
Examples of PhD researchers branching out in this way include the historian whose research into Anglican missionaries’ role in the transatlantic slave trade led to working as a consultant for the Church Of England, advising on how to address church memorials with links to slavery and contested heritage.
To explore if and how consulting could be a way to increase your impact and experience, then consider the following questions:
- Who your potential clients might be. What kinds of organisations, groups, or types of people could benefit from your expertise? Who might be facing problems or challenges for which your knowledge could help contribute to solutions?
- Where your potential clients are. Where do your potential clients go for information on the subject or issue with which you can help them? What events do they attend where you might be able to meet them? What kinds of online forums, platforms, or mailing lists do they use where you could also have a presence? When you know this, then you can also think about…
- How you can reach your potential clients. Do you already have connections with potential clients, or access to channels via which you could reach them, for example, through PhD partner organisations, other stakeholders, or personal connections? If you don’t have any direct connections, do you know anyone who does? Can anyone in your existing network help to link you up with people who might benefit from your expertise? How can you establish yourself as a ‘go-to’ person for what you want to be known for: for example, would keeping a blog, or being a guest writer or interviewee on established blogs or podcasts in your field help to raise your profile? Overall, think about what kind of Google or LinkedIn searches would you want to show up in the results for, and what steps can you take towards realising that.
If you’re currently in a university, check out the support available: it may be that, like at the University of Birmingham where I work, there’s a team to help you with setting yourself up as a freelance consultant.
3. Represent It.
This third way of using your research to make an impact might take a bit more explaining than the previous two… but let’s give it a go. This option is most likely to be feasible if your research is focused on a specific population or group of people, but if you work on any socially salient issues then there may well be opportunities to ‘represent it.’ This refers to any place in which you could act as a representative or advocate for a particular group of people, perspective, approach, lived experience… whatever it may be. One example here might be a PhD researcher whose work on healthy aging in the British Muslim population leads them to represent the needs of older Muslim members of the community at a patient advocacy group focused on helping older adults to access healthcare services.
It might also involve drawing on your own lived experience or on a cause that you feel passionate about the represent this within groups and forums: for example, acting as an equality, diversity, and inclusion ‘rep’ within your department, or on a committee for a professional body or learned society.
Opportunities to ‘represent it’ are more likely to be voluntary than ‘teaching it’ or ‘consulting it,’ and might include things like becoming a trustee for a charity, a school governor, or something similar. However, they could act as useful way to raise your profile in your desired field, to develop skills like strategic thinking and leadership, and to understand how organisations like charities work, which might be helpful if such organisations might be your potential clients for ‘teaching it’ or ‘consulting it’ in the future.
So there you have it, that’s teach it/ consult it/ represent it… ways to grow an existing portfolio career, expand your skills and experience, diversify your income streams, and explore where your skills can make an impact in the wider world. How can you use your research to teach it/ consult it/ represent it? Or perhaps you’ve made a start and are putting some of this into action already? Tell us in the comments about what this looks like for you!