Mixing things up: Using your PhD to forge a portfolio career by Holly Prescott

When I finished my PhD in 2011, a ‘stable’, full-time job felt a long way off. Every morning when I woke up, I’d have to remind myself what day it was and what I did on that day.

Monday was teaching day, when I’d work as a Visiting Lecturer on a module teaching English Literature from 1770 to the present day. On Tuesdays, I did my work for a part-time role at the same university, creating online resources for research staff professional development. Then Wednesday to Friday I worked – again in the same university – for the Postgraduate Student Recruitment Office, representing the university at study fairs and copywriting for publications like the postgraduate prospectus.

On the surface my working week looked messy, and I envied people who got to do ‘just one job.’ At the same time though, I got a certain energy from the variety of my work. Plus, if I had a bad day in one job, my other roles helped give me perspective and focus on what was going well.

It's funny to look back now and see that, even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was working in a portfolio way, across three different roles, in three different departments, with three different managers. And, I was using different bits of myself and my expertise in each assignment.

• In my teaching, I was using the subject knowledge gained through my PhD in contemporary English literature.
  
  
• In my professional development role, I was using some experience I’d had of leading skill development workshops for postgrad researchers, as well as my skills and enjoyment of creating educational resources.
  
  
• In my postgraduate student recruitment work, I was using my knowledge of and empathy with the postgraduate student experience to inform and support others looking to enrol on a Masters or PhD.

Admittedly, wearing so many ‘hats’ in a working week isn’t for everyone, and it did take a certain amount of mental effort to ‘switch’ between roles. Also, I want to take great care here not to glorify or glamourise precarity: I see many PhD graduates struggling to find full-time jobs who are thus forced to piece together a living from ‘scraps’ of work including ‘casual’ jobs, zero-hours contracts, and part-time roles in sectors like retail and hospitality that often feel more like regressing to their teenage weekend jobs than living a post-doctoral professional life.

However, when done purposefully in a way that lets you put a range of your skills and expertise into action, having a ‘portfolio career’ (as it has come to be known) can suit some people,  especially if you’re likely to feel bored or stifled in a one-job working week. So, if you’re one of those people, then how can you use your PhD experience to create your own portfolio career?

1) Explore what you could TEACH.

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 is by using your expertise to teach, train, or develop others in some way. Obvious options here include things like:

• Part-time teaching opportunities in your academic subject, such as teaching assistant, teaching fellow, visiting lecturer, ‘adjunct’ teaching or other such roles.
• Teaching in a different department, such as a university’s maths support centre, academic skills service, or other department that covers more ‘foundational’ skills.

• Outreach and public engagement activities.
• Using findings or methods from your research to inform or upskill other professionals. Think about whose practice or approach could be enhanced through insights from your own work, be it through running training, contributing to professional development publications, or something else.

2) Explore how you could CONSULT.

Being a ‘consultant’ ultimately means offering advice and services to some kind of client group that they can’t provide for themselves. Perhaps they don’t have the expertise needed, or the time to invest in a certain piece of work. That’s where you come in, using your expertise to help ‘clients’ to solve problems they can’t solve by themselves.

To explore if consulting could be part of your portfolio career, consider the following questions:

• Who could your clients be? What kinds of organisations, groups, or people could benefit from your expertise?
• Where are your potential clients likely to be? Where do they go for information on the subject or issue with which you can help them? What kinds of online forums, platforms, or mailing lists do they use? When you know this, then you can also think about…
• How can you reach your potential clients? Do you already have connections with them or access to channels via which you could reach them, or do you know people who do? Would activities like keeping a blog or being a guest writer or interviewee on 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.

3) Explore how you could REPRESENT.

This option is most likely to be feasible if your research is focused on a specific population or group of people, or if you work on socially salient issues. It involves thinking about how you could use your expertise to act as a representative or advocate for a particular group of people, perspective, approach, or lived experience.

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 could be your potential clients for other paid work in the future.

So, there you have it, a host of ways you can leverage your PhD research and experience for a portfolio career. Have you made a start, are you doing any of these things already? If so, tell us in the comments about what this looks like for you and spark ideas for other PhD researchers!

Author bio

Holly Prescott is a career guidance practitioner specialising in working with PhD and Postdoctoral Researchers. She is Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Birmingham (UK) and in 2021 she founded the PhD careers blog ‘PostGradual’ which has since attracted over 52,000 readers from 149 different countries.

Link to the Holly's blog: https://phd-careers.co.uk/