The Future of Work is portfolio-shaped
As more creative professionals adopt portfolio careers, the question is whether the industry will lead by design.
The portfolio career is already here
Meet Sarah. On Monday morning, she's animating for Netflix. Tuesday afternoon, she's teaching digital storytelling at Columbia. Wednesday, she's helping her brother flip houses. Thursday and Friday, she's back to animation; this time with fresh perspectives from everything else she's touched.
Sarah doesn't have a side hustle. She has a portfolio career. Or, more accurately, portfolio careers. The plural matters.
A portfolio - or mosaic - career differs from freelancing (multiple clients, same service) and side hustles (a primary job plus secondary income) because it involves multiple primary roles in the same or across disciplines. While this model won’t be for everyone, the intentional cultivation of multiple professional identities is becoming a defining feature of modern work.
Here on LinkedIn you'll likely witness the rise of multi-hyphenated titles: “Designer / Farmer / Founder,” “Singer / Skincare Influencer/ Coach.” What once looked like inconsistency or branding quirks now reads as strategy, as well as evidence of a deeper structural shift.
The gig economy laid the groundwork. The pandemic exposed how fluid work could actually be. And while many organizations reverted to familiar structures, people didn’t: 52% of workers now have professional ambitions that aren't tied to any single company, according to The Portfolio Collective.
Technology and commerce are now beginning to catch up to human ambition. Tools like Slack enable seamless context-switching and integrated learning, while the creator economy has legitimized passion projects as viable primary revenue streams. As younger generations watch loyalty be rewarded with redundancy, diversification feels safer than ever.
Portfolio careers are here to stay. The real question is who will shape the opportunity they bring. And no sector is better positioned to lead than the Creative Industries.
From singular systems to creative evolution
Walk into most HR and People teams and you’ll still encounter systems designed around a primary assumption: humans as single-function contributors dedicated to one employer, one role, one ladder. Even the most progressive organizations remain largely grounded in linear progression. Not out of ill intent but because the systems themselves were never designed for anything else.
Jobs are singular. Salary bands assume upward, uninterrupted, discipline-based trajectories. Organizations call for “innovation,” yet often penalize the very multiplicity that enables it. When people stretch across disciplines, systems read that stretch as risk rather than value.
Even our professional platforms struggle to keep up. LinkedIn’s new algorithm, for example, is built to categorize people into one primary identity at a time, quietly suppressing the visibility of hybrid professionals in search results.
This way of working may feel new to corporations, but for creative professionals, it is familiar. Much of the infrastructure already exists: project-based work, contracts, day rates, agents, and the fluid movement between teams and contexts.
More importantly, creatives are inherently curious and adaptive. Research from the UK’s National Institute for Career Education and Counselling describes creative identities as “protean” — fluid, evolving, and shaped by context. That combination of curiosity and flexibility makes it easier for multiple interests to coexist, rather than being compartmentalized or forced into hierarchy and false priority. Research from the University of Edinburgh (2025) shows creative workers are the most frequent "slashies" eg. “Designer / Farmer / Founder.”
And while many creatives are deeply single-minded and devoted to one craft, which remains important, our combined experience across geographies and teams suggests that creative fluidity is not the exception, but the prevailing mode.
Designing for multiplicity: the infrastructure we need next
Moving forward requires shifting from systems that manage singularity to systems that support multiplicity. What follows is a set of design directions for evolving how we learn, how we work, and how our contributions can remain sustainable over time.
Redesigning education
Universities are still largely structured to prepare graduates for a singular job market — one degree, one discipline, one professional identity at a time. To support portfolio careers, education must shift from producing specialists for fixed roles to cultivating synthesis and expertise across domains.
This could take the form of:
Stackable micro-credentials that combine into custom degrees. Not a “BA in Marketing,” but credentials in behavioral psychology, data storytelling, business and community building that together form a “BA in Cultural Strategy.” Think of it as the "missing link" between Psychology, Business and Design Thinking. While you won't often find a "B.A. in Cultural Strategy," the subject is thriving under different names.
Formal cross-field apprenticeships that count as academic credit, recognizing that learning across contexts is not a detour from education, but central to becoming a good learner and, ultimately, a better teacher, employee and leader.
Redefining contribution beyond job titles
Today’s employee experience remains stuck in a one-dimensional model — from hiring to retention — despite the reality of how most creative professionals actually work. Supporting portfolio careers requires a fundamental shift in how contribution is defined and managed.
This could take the form of:
Replace rigid job titles with archetypes that describe patterns of contribution rather than siloed roles or fixed positions. Instead of being hired into a single position, professionals might hold one or several modes of contribution — Architect, Maker, Storyteller, Synthesizer — depending on the work at hand. Some organizations, like GROUP OF HUMANS® , are already experimenting with this approach, where talent is valued for how it contributes, not where it sits. And Generalist World has job titles divided this way.
Use technology as enablement, not talent. We design portfolio orchestration tools to help organizations and professionals coordinate multiple commitments from sequencing work to surfacing connections and learning across practices. Instead of maximizing output, this approach supports a portfolio ecology that respects different kinds of work, rhythms and conditions for value creation.
Design support systems for continuity rather than permanence. Ideas like portable benefits that modularly follow the person (rather than the job), weekly or milestone-based payment systems that support cash flow, peer learning cohorts for constructive dialogue and shared sense-making, and built-in sabbaticals to explore adjacent fields without penalty.
Shifting from retirement to regeneration
Retirement is a promise built on endurance: work now, live later. Fulfilment is deferred. Energy is depleted. Joy and rest is postponed until a finish line that keeps moving.
Portfolio careers offer a different possibility for creative professionals and everyone else. When work is distributed across practices that evolve over time, the question is no longer "when do I stop?", but "how do I shift?".
At 65 (or earlier/ later) one practice may take precedence over others. Teaching may replace production. Mentorship may replace execution. Work continues, but at a pace that matches energy, health and curiosity.
We must design work for longevity without treating rest as a reward at the end. We must design for work longevity by building regeneration into the system from the beginning.
The work ahead: lead by design or inherit by default
Portfolio careers can no longer be treated as an edge case by institutions designed for a past that never existed. The shift is already underway — not because multi-hyphenated people are confused or uncommitted, but because the way they want to contribute no longer fits inside singular boxes.
It’s a shift that honors the reality that humans are complex, and that creativity thrives on cross-pollination and meaningful work that rarely fits cleanly into predefined roles.
Creative industries are uniquely positioned to lead this transition because creative work has always required multiplicity, cross-pollination and comfort with ambiguity. Multi-hyphenate professionals are not an anomaly, they are the advance guard of a different way of working.
The work ahead is not to convince people that portfolio careers are valid, but to design systems that support multiplicity: education that teaches synthesis, workplaces that recognize patterns of contribution and technologies that coordinate complexity.
The opportunity is to build a creative economy where joy, sustainability and excellence reinforce one another rather than compete. The question is no longer whether work will change, but whether creative leaders will lead by design, or be shaped by decisions made elsewhere — without creativity in sight.
Thanks Hannah Kreiswirth for being a co-creator to this piece.
Alê and Hannah have 50+ years of combined experience in creative leadership. They are collaborators across articles, speaking and trainings about the Future of Work. Together, Alê and Hannah aim to combine creative leadership and systems design to prototype what the future of work — and the future of creativity — can become.
As the founder of The Tomorrow Collective, Alê supports Creative Leaders who want to future-proof their teams and processes during times of intense uncertainty, ensuring they stay profitable while elevating creative excellence. To discuss your needs book a complimentary 30-min call.
