Designing an Illustrated Guide for Building Career Resilience
As someone who's constantly navigating the career maze, I was intrigued by the concept of living a Portfolio Life.
The seed was originally planted in my mind by writer and podcaster Emma Gannon and her work about living as a multi-hyphenate.
Later on, I discovered Christina Wallace's book The Portfolio Life. I really resonated with it because it's a pattern I've seen in my life time and time again.
Wallace's book is built on this premise: You are not your title, your job, or your industry.
It's a radical idea to accept because it goes against what we've learned since childhood. We love our titles, don't we? In fact, many of us believe it pretty much sums up who we are.
But Wallace's book challenges us to consider the idea that who we are is not determined by our work, at least not entirely. We are multifaceted individuals with many interests, skills, and abilities; our work is only one aspect of who we are.
She suggests that instead of pursuing a single career path, we should look at our lives as a portfolio. 📉
Just as we wouldn't put all our investments in one basket, we should also diversify our career paths to de-risk ourselves from life's turbulences whether that's job loss, economic downturns, or industry disruption (AI, anyone? 🤖)
Reading the book got my gears spinning with ideas I could use in my own life. With these in mind, I was inspired to create a guided mini-journal on this theme as it's something I needed myself.
Featuring a step-by-step guide with lots of illustrated scenes and self-reflection exercises, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Below are some of the pages on mockups:
