Concurrent multiple careers

Workers with concurrent multiple careers adopt a "hyphenated" professional identity. A "teacher-painter" might refer to an individual who works for nine months out of the year as an Elementary School Teacher and three (summer) months out of the year as a painter. A "doctor-potter" might refer to an individual who works as an ENT-physician during the day, but works within a ceramics studio at night. Some consider the hyphen "-homemaker" or "-caregiver" as suggestive of another type of concurrent multiple career worker. That is, a "lawyer-homemaker" works as attorney and is also in charge of domestic duties at home. Increasingly, as adults must care for younger generation children and older generation parents, the "X-caregiver" worker has emerged — where a worker completes the tasks of career-X and simultaneously cares for the needs of children and elders. Some note that many members of the working class have long been concurrent workers out of economic necessity.

Workers can adopt concurrent multiple careers for a host of reasons including: economic (such as poverty or striving for additional wealth), educational (such as multiple degrees in multiple fields), or personal (such as interest or lack of fulfillment in one career). Economist, Richard Florida, among others suggests that some "hyphenates" pursue multiple concurrent careers in order to fulfill creative needs. A "doctor-potter," for example, might pursue ceramics for creative fulfillment as well as profit and professional development.

Author and New York Times columnist Marci Alboher popularized the term "slash careers" to describe multiple concurrent careers in her book One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work Life Success (2007). Instead of hyphenation, Alboher uses slash to demarcate concurrent multiple careers, as in "art dealer/yoga instructor" or "baker/comedian/web designer".


Sequential multiple careers
Workers with sequential multiple careers adopt a changing professional identity over time. Thus, a worker may devote 10-20 years of his/her life to one career and then switch to a related career or an entirely new one. As life-expectancy increases, as retirement benefits decrease, and as educational opportunities expand — workers may increasingly find themselves forced to fulfill the goals of one career and then adopt another. Some view this as an opportunity to expand meaning and purpose into later life, while others see this trend as an unfortunate economic and social reality.

A new term and developing concept around the idea of multiple careers is "Career Diversity".