A bit of this, and a bit of that

looms most of us know what to expect. Now, at the merest whiff of restructuring - before black dustbin bags are even a twinkle in our boss's eye - there's only one buzz word: portfolio working.

In the Eighties it was enough to be told to get on our bike - or to sort ourselves out by going self-employed, despite being warned that the dog-shampooing market was finite and there would never have a proper pension.

A decade later, change had become so endemic that a new spin was needed.

There had to be some light at the end of the downsizing tunnel - as if there really was a gravy train coming our way.

It's why, along with a crisis of masculinity and an inner child, the late Nineties likes to insist each of us has a portfolio of skills. We try not to get the giggles when people talk about it being the Way Ahead and just hope they get a proper job soon.

At a distance portfolio working - juggling your skills to seize lots of job opportunities - sounds attractive. Who wouldn't jump at the chance to tell the boss what to do with his Eighties management style and irritating assumption that only you know where the Christmas decorations are?

Or is it simply another way of having us running around like headless chickens again, but this time thinking it's terribly liberating? It was bad enough being self-employed and using one skill to make ends meet. Now we're expected to have about half-a-dozen careers on the go simultaneously believing we're on the cusp of the zeitgeist.

Yet aren't we all portfolio workers anyway in our full-time jobs? To portfolio fanatics, for example, simply making a cup of office tea unleashes a whole raft of fantastic marketable skills from teabag dunking (catering assistant) to telling someone where the milk is (supervisory management) to sympathising with their sciatica (care work). Optimism is a key word in the portfolio vocabulary.

It's the unholy portfolio matrimony of corporate-speak and New Age that should have alerted us. "Flexibility", "reengineering" and "the virtual office" have to be a boon for companies eager to stay as lean and mean as possible. On the other hand New Age neologisms offer us "centredness" (staring into space wondering why on earth you're doing this) and "empowerment" (lots of hideous part-time jobs because you can't do without them).

The great guru of portfolio working is Charles Handy - who sees it as the next century's ideal job creation scheme. But it's interesting that as a bestselling author he doesn't need to do any of it.

Does he know something we don't?

The rest of us are on our own. CVs look unimpressively bloated with a little bit of this and a little bit of that - all you're equipped for is, well, portfolio working.

At parties when people ask what you do, you look embarrassed and come up with the dreaded P-word. But what, they say, do you really, really do? You give up and claim you're between jobs.

It sounds much more accurate.

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.