If you can do more, try a few careers until you're sure

Recently, Aaron Karo performed stand-up comedy in sold-out shows in Boston. He also bills himself as an author, public speaker, and sitcom actor.

Karo has always juggled a few careers. After college, he went to work for an investment bank. But he was also writing a weekly newsletter on college life -- with an emphasis on sex and drinking -- that had tens of thousands of subscribers. And he wrote a book that grew out of the column.

About 10 years ago, British management guru Charles Handy predicted people would replace the idea of one, full-time job with several part-time occupations. He called this the ''portfolio career," and Karo provides a good example of how this trend is taking shape.

A portfolio career is not the same thing as holding down three bad jobs and wishing you could figure out what to do with yourself. Rather, it is a scheme you pursue as a way to achieve financial or personal goals or a mixture of both. This new type of career choice can include several skilled, professional posts, often mixing employment with self-employment, and volunteer work or learning work with fee-based work. While there has been scattered adoption of the portfolio career among baby boomers, the idea is gaining a lot of traction among younger workers, even though they never use the term.

The Electronic Recruiting Exchange reports that as many as one-third of new workers want alternatives to full-time employment. For people in their 20s and early 30s, a portfolio career is a means of self-discovery, hedging one's bets, and protecting quality of life.

Most people have skills that cross into more than one profession. And if you take any one of the popular personality tests offered by websites and career counselors, you will find that peoples' personalities do not fit neatly into one type of profession either. So the idea of having to choose one profession is frequently unappealing.

''A lot of people feel alienated when they feel there is more to themselves that they have not shown" in their work, says Ezra Zuckerman, associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Young people are particularly drawn to the idea of a career as a way to fulfillment and self-actualization, so they are less apt to settle into one, narrow career.

The arguments for a portfolio career at the beginning of one's adult life are clear. The best way to figure out what will make you happy is to try it, according to Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard. A portfolio career gives you the opportunity to try several types of work at the same time, and to keep switching until you come up with a portfolio you like.

Karo, for example, dropped the banking career when he stopped liking the daily suit-and-tie routine. And today, when you ask him when his next book is coming out, he hems and haws and it's clear the career as an author is not so appealing -- at least right now.

The trick in all career decisions is to figure out the intersection of your skills and passions. This is an ongoing process, not a final destination, so a portfolio of part-time careers is more conducive to this path of discovery than a single, eight-hour-every-day career.

Andrew Zacharakis, professor at Babson College, says, ''Passion is something you have to look for every day of your life. Your passion is likely to change over time but finding your passion is good practice. Part of the search for your passion should be a search to know what your skill set is. Ask parents, mentors, and friends. Try to match skills you have with your passion."

The problem with a portfolio career is that you run the risk being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none -- a problem in terms of both money and fulfillment.

''The most secure portfolio careers are with people who have a fairly solid skill base that people will pay for," says Ian Christie, career coach and author of the Bold Career blog. ''You have to hang your hat on something. Either a functional skill, like accounting, and you can be, say, a personal trainer at home. Or you need to find a market niche and provide a lot of services, such as training, development, outsource contracting, etc." And you probably need a creative outlet.

''When we are involved in creativity we feel that we are living more fully than in the rest of life," says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and author of ''Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention."

Any work can include creative thinking, but ''if you want to be creative then you must learn to do something well," To excel at something requires you to challenge yourself continually. Achieving a high skill level at something is an important step toward fulfillment because, ''most people want to think they have explored the limits of their potential."

Karo says he receives a lot of e-mail from people asking how they can follow their creative dreams. And his advice is, appropriately, the instant-message-length version of Handy's book-length theory: ''You've gotta do it on the side. Diversify your revenue streams. Do what you're passionate about."