Not all parallel careers lead to the same outcomes

As a kid, I used to think that careers worked somewhat like relationships, in the sense that people would “date” (take jobs at) different companies until they had finally found “the one” that they wanted to spend the rest of their career with.

That’s not what most people’s careers look like in practice. Not only is job-hopping a thing, there are even people who have multiple jobs at the same time. Often this takes the form of moonlighting, where a person does the same job at two different places. Parallel careers are a related but distinct concept that involves multiple distinct career paths (side note: To illustrate, a professional who takes extra evening shifts is moonlighting, while a surgeon who also teaches is pursuing a second career path.).

Parallel careers are generally thought to be associated with positive outcomes, but the authors of this paper suggest that treating all people with parallel careers as a homogeneous group risks overgeneralisation: simultaneously combining multiple roles poses challenges that may mitigate or even negate any positive effects.

This paper examines which typical parallel career profiles exist and how they relate to sustainable career outcomes.

Before we dive into the study, there are two theories relevant to parallel careers that you need to know: protean career theory and boundaryless career theory.

A protean career is one where an individual is guided by internal values such as personal fulfilment rather than external factors such as salary and promotions. This helps with proactive learning and adaptation to new challenges.

Meanwhile, boundaryless careers transcend traditional organisational limits along two dimensions: physical and psychological mobility. Physical mobility involves movement between jobs, firms, occupations, or countries, whereas psychological mobility refers to openness to forming work-related relationships beyond traditional organisational boundaries.

A survey was conducted among hundreds of Brazilian respondents with a postgraduate degree, who are less likely to hold two jobs due to financial necessity.

In the survey data, the researchers identified five distinct clusters that have significant differences in career attitudes. Three of these are career profiles that have been described in the literature earlier:

1. The protean career architect is protean and boundaryless, and has high levels of self-directedness, values-driven career orientation, and both boundaryless career dimensions.

2. The organisation person (side note: Is it just me, or does this sound a bit funny?) has higher self-directed career management and psychological mobility but lower values-driven orientation and physical mobility than the protean career architect.

3. People who feel trapped/lost have little self-directedness, are not driven by values, and have low psychological and physical mobility.

Two are new, in the sense that prior literature on single-career profiles apparently considered them unlikely to exist:

4. People with the spare profile score low on self-directedness and psychological mobility but high on values-driven and physical mobility. They mostly seem to engage in parallel careers for practical reasons, treating the parallel career as a backup (or “spare tyre”) rather than a deliberate pursuit of protean ideals.

5. Finally, the ethereal profile scores low on protean career dimensions but high on boundaryless dimensions. This suggests that people with this profile take a very reactive approach to career management heavily influenced by external pressures.

For the purposes of this study, career sustainability is defined by three factors: happiness, health, and productivity.

Happiness is about work engagement and career satisfaction. It’s believed that having parallel careers can improve happiness by broadening perspectives and providing opportunities across multiple domains.

Health is based on sickness absenteeism and burnout, as illness and exhaustion hinder work effectiveness. Parallel career tracks are thought to help alleviate these issues by offering cognitive variety and mental rejuvenation.

Finally, productivity can be determined based on someone’s perceived employability, as people who feel more employable tend to perform better. Although people are often concerned about parallel careers causing divided attention, in practice they may actually boost productivity through skill diversification, new challenges, and opportunities.

Based on what we already know, one would expect that protean career architects have superior sustainable career outcomes.

That indeed seems to be the case – no surprises here. Both protean career architect and organisation person profiles have good sustainable career outcomes due to their associated protean and boundaryless attitudes. Protean career architects tend to score highest on productivity and happiness, while organisation person profiles excel in health-related outcomes.

Ethereals, on the other hand, score low on health, while spare profiles suffer from low employability and career satisfaction. This suggests that not all parallel career track profiles are sustainable in the long run.

Overall, these findings suggest that career counsellors (side note: If you hadn’t noticed, this paper was published in the Journal of Employment Counseling, which seems like a very niche thing to have a journal for…) should take these different profiles into account during their counselling sessions, as each profile requires different forms of support.

It’s also worth noting that profiles are not static but may change over time based on factors such as age, life stage, and economic circumstances. Younger people may be more likely to adopt ethereal or spare profiles as they explore career options, while mid-career professionals may transition more into protean career architects or organisation person profiles.