Are portfolio careers the bridge to a post-job world?
Recalibrating what counts as work and why it matters.
This article has also been published as a guest post in Rick Foerster’s new series, Alter Egos; honest accounts from real people who are trying to push work past its limits.
From Jobs to Portfolio Careers to Portfolio Lives
The full-time job has long been the center of work and life. It shapes how we spend our time, how we earn money, and how we make sense of ourselves. None of us knows exactly how work will evolve in the coming years but we can all feel that something is changing. That our narrow definition of work may no longer fit the world we’re moving into.
Is it the end of work? Probably not in the way you’re now imagining it. But the full-time job, as the dominant container through which work is organized, seems to be losing its hold.
Could the path ahead not be from job to job, or even from job to freedom, but from full-time jobs, to portfolio careers, and eventually to portfolio lives? In that sense, portfolio careers could serve as a bridge toward a post-job world: a way for people to gradually move away from job-centered lives to a more self-authored way of working and living.
That thought has been circling my mind for a while and it’s the one I want to explore more deeply here.
Our Definition of Work
For a long time, I didn’t really question what we mean by work. Like most of us, I treated it as shorthand for paid employment: the job, the role, the title on a LinkedIn profile. For decades, the full-time job became the primary container for our time, energy, and attention. It absorbs most of our waking hours. Life is structured around the job, and everything else has to squeeze in around it.
But that narrow definition excludes much of what actually keeps our lives, and society, functioning. Care work, relationships, learning, tending to our health, contributing to society. All of this requires real effort, time, and energy, yet rarely counts as ‘real work’. Without it, nothing else holds. Still, we’ve learned to treat these activities as secondary, something to fit in around the edges of what’s considered productive. This is exhausting and it undervalues everything we do that keeps society alive, connected, and compassionate. It makes you wonder whether we’re fundamentally misunderstanding where value is really created.
We’ve internalized the idea that value only shows up on a payslip. We’ve built a society that runs on invisible labor and then organized identity and security around the one form of work that pays.
So isn’t what we define as ‘work’ overdue for a massive reframe, for one that makes room for the full human experience?
The Job is Loosing its Monopoly
What I’ve been describing is not necessarily new. The flaws of the system have been visible for a long time. What is changing now is the speed and the convergence of forces hitting the full-time job at once. AI, automation, and robotics are driving the cost of knowledge and labor toward zero, disrupting entire industries in the process. Companies are laying off thousands of employees despite reporting record profits. Tasks that once required whole teams are now being absorbed by technology, breaking traditional jobs into smaller components.
As work becomes more modular, companies are increasingly hiring for projects, part-time, or fractional roles rather than permanent positions. A shift accelerated by digital platforms, the need for specialized skills on demand, and the desire to remain flexible in volatile markets. As Rishad Tobaccowala1 puts it, we are moving toward a world with five types of workers: full-time employees, contractors, freelancers, fractional professionals, and increasingly, AI agents.
And when work becomes more fragmented, modular, and unstable, people start reorganizing themselves. The job has not disappeared, but its dominance is fading and we can see new patterns emerging. There’s a hint of what’s coming: a world where ‘fractional’ might become the default, not the exception. Where people mix multiple roles, projects and income streams into their own version of work.
Portfolio Careers as a Transitional Model
My bet is that portfolio careers are likely to become more mainstream. Not because everyone suddenly wants them, but as a pragmatic response to a changing labor market shaped by volatility, automation, and institutional fragility.
Apart from that, the full-time job was never able to meet all our needs in the first place. We are multi-dimensional humans, yet industrialisation pushed us into ever narrower forms of specialization. Instead of chasing a perfect job that delivers income, meaning, security, creativity, and impact all at once, people break this bundle apart and reassemble it on their own terms.
A portfolio career is a way of doing exactly that. Rather than relying on a single full-time role, it combines different forms of work and income streams into a deliberately designed mix. That might include part-time or fractional roles, consulting, creative projects, digital products, services, or volunteering. Some parts generate income. Others provide meaning, learning, or connection. Together, they form one coherent working life.
There’s also a pragmatic dimension. By diversifying work across multiple sources, people become less dependent on a single employer, more resilient to change and better able to adapt as industries shift. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, you spread your bets.
In practice, portfolio careers can take many forms. Most combine stable income streams with more exploratory work.
In my own case, I currently split my week between a fractional marketing role for two days, which covers the basics, one day writing on the future of work, and two days focused on portfolio career mentoring and developing my offerings. Alongside this, I deliberately set time aside for investing, continuous learning, and contributing to the local climate community. Others assemble different components around the same logic.
My friend Fiona works fractionally in customer success at a tech start-up while teaching yoga and building products and services around her work on overcoming insomnia among high achievers. Her current split is roughly 30% fractional work, 20% yoga, and 50% focused on insomnia-related content creation, coaching, and digital products.
Many people actually transition from a job to a portfolio career by developing a side project alongside a job and then gradually shifting the balance over time. It’s a way to experiment without jumping off a cliff, building skills, confidence, and optionality as you go. Importantly, portfolio careers are not static. They evolve with life stages, interests, and responsibilities. Workloads scale up and down. Components are added, paused, or dropped. That flexibility is precisely the point.
And here’s another thought: Are portfolio careers maybe not the end of the story but a transitional model? A practical way of navigating the gap between the collapsing world of jobs and a more self-authored way of working and living?
Portfolio Life: Beyond the Job as the Centre of Life
So let’s take it one step further. Portfolio careers may not be the destination, they may be the training ground. A way people are learning to live beyond the full-time job.
For decades, the job shaped how we allocated time, defined success, and decided what counted as valuable. As that structure weakens, something important becomes visible again: much of what keeps life and society functioning was never absent but it was clearly pushed to the margins. Care, relationships, health, learning, contribution. Real work, but rarely recognised as such.
Seen in this light, the shift toward portfolio careers is not just a labor market adjustment. It is a first step toward recalibrating what we value. A move away from treating paid employment as the sole legitimate form of work, and toward recognising the full range of activities that sustain a meaningful and resilient life. A larger shift from organizing life around a job to organizing life around a portfolio: of work, care, relationships, health, learning, contribution.
It’s understandably hard to imagine life without jobs at the center. For most of us, work has been synonymous with survival, structure, and legitimacy. But once AI and automation performs most labor better, faster, cheaper, and safer, we may be forced to confront a new reality. One where obligatory labor is eliminated, ownership broadly distributed and humans do what humans do when they are not forced to sell their time to survive.2 One where questions of identity, contribution, and meaning can no longer be outsourced to employment alone.
As Rick Foerster points out in this article, a portfolio life is not about abandoning ambition or productivity. It’s about taking a more deliberate, multi-dimensional approach to life that doesn’t collapse identity into a single role, but allows different sources of motivation and meaning to coexist and evolve over time.
The example Rick shares of how his own portfolio has shifted across life stages makes this tangible. It’s not a rigid framework or a calculated formula, but a living composition shaped by circumstances, priorities, and personal values. Just like a portfolio career, a portfolio of life is never finished. It adapts as we do.
(Image credit: Rick Foerster, Diversified Portfolio of Identities)
The transition from full-time jobs, to portfolio careers, and eventually to portfolio lives won’t be easy. But rather than being abruptly pushed into a post-labor future, it could offer a gradual way out of job-centered living.
That pace matters. Not just economically, but especially psychologically, because the hardest part will be letting go of identities, routines, and measures of worth shaped by decades of job-centered living.3
Navigating it will require new forms of guidance - culturally, politically, and personally. But if we get it right, it may also be our best chance to build a society that values what actually makes life work.
Read Rishad Tobaccowala’s book ‘Rethinking Work’ for details or dive into some of his Substack articles such as Pioneering the Future of Work.
I’m sure, you’re now thinking about how we replace household income as jobs collapse, so I recommend to read this article and explore David Shapiro’s work on post-labor economics.
Learn more about the transition from a job to a portfolio career and the unique psychological challenges here.
About Afterwork.
I’m building Afterwork to help people navigate the biggest shift of our time as AI disrupts work as we know it. I write about what comes next - from portfolio careers to deeper questions of identity, purpose, and life beyond employment.
Through my mentoring, I work 1:1 with professionals transitioning from jobs into portfolio careers.
Great post Iwana as you know 😉
This diagram is awesome. My life at 70 is evolving into a portfolio career lifestyle.