Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm Helen and this is the squiggly careers podcast where every week we share

ideas for action and tools to try out that we hope will help you and pretty much always us

to navigate our squiggly careers with a bit more confidence, clarity and control.

And this week we are talking about how to have a portfolio career,

which is a topic inspired by some work we're doing with a department of education all around

portfolio careers. And we went out to our community on Instagram and we said, would you like

us to do a podcast topic on this a bit more broadly. And pretty much everyone, I think it might

have been 100% yes. And we asked what the questions people had were. And some of it was really

basic. It was like, what is a portfolio career? And some of it was like, well, how do I talk

about this with my manager and how do I balance like incomes and all that kind of stuff? So today

we're going to get really, really practical about portfolio careers,

starting with what it actually means.

And so I think this is actually a really good question from our community

because I think portfolio careers used to mean when you're very senior,

you stop doing and spending all of your time on one job and you start spending your

time on a number of jobs at the same time. And it felt like that was something almost like you

transitioned to and it became almost a career stage for certain people, usually at certain

points in the career ladder. So I think one of the things that we've got to do with this idea of portfolio careers

is sort of unlearn that that's what a portfolio career looks like.

And in its simplest definition, I think it's probably,

how are you spending the hours that you work every week?

And I think the difference between almost like a singular career

...