Why a Single Career is a Thing of the Past

5 Reasons to Pursue Multiple Careers

Updated: December 5, 2017

In our blog post on Understanding Millennials, we discussed how millennials are among mankind’s most generous, steadfast, engaged, responsible, trusting, and wise generations. Earlier generations judge millennials by yesterday’s model of working in a single career followed by retirement and living on savings and pension. That way doesn’t exist for the millennials. No one is planning to pay them a pension, and they are not planning to have huge savings saved up as their parents and grandparents did. This generation thinks differently about life, living, working, and retiring.

We are witnessing a tectonic shift before our very eyes, and most of us are missing it. Gone are the days of choosing a college major based on the one type of job we want to get. No longer will the present and future generations be holding one career, retiring in their 60s, and living until their late 80s or early 90s. With all the improvements in public health and advancements in medical technology, the current generation’s expected lifespan is 100 plus years and rising! So, if millennials were to follow the trend of previous generations and retire in their 60s, they would need to support themselves on social security for more than 40 years. That is not feasible.

We as a world need to be prepared to contemplate a future where millennials will wait until their 90s to retire or not retire at all.

This increase in lifespan comes with the great challenge of enhanced adaptability, it is also filled with great opportunity. This generation gets to explore various areas of interest and not feel the pressure of finding “the right job” straight out of college. Their parents may feel that pressure and worry about their grownup kids not having a stable career, but Millennials don’t have to and actually don’t. Millennials have already tried their hands at multiple careers, and they intend to continue to do so through their life. Today’s millennial may spend 10-20 years building up and running a company, then transition into the arts and teaching for the next 5-10 years, then running a charity, and then starting a company all over again, all the while traveling around the world, writing about their travels and sharing their memories, experiences, and observations on social media. Facebook is many things to many people. From one perspective, it is a living record of this generation’s travels and experiences. It is the incontrovertible evidence that this generation’s imagination far exceeds the limited worldview of previous generations.

However, being open to multiple careers need not be limited to millennials and generations thereafter. Discussed below are 5 reasons why everybody should consider pursuing multiple careers, either serially or simultaneously.

1. Increased income

   This might seem like an obvious reason. But who wouldn’t want to jump at the opportunity to make some extra cash? It is also practical to have multiple streams of income rather than putting all your eggs in one basket, especially in an ever-changing economic landscape where anything can change from one moment to the next. Extra income also gives you more opportunities to pursue multiple passions.

2. Learn and use new skills

   There is only so much you can learn by reading how-to books or sitting in a classroom. Truly mastering a new skill requires hands-on practice. What better way to do that than in your career? You may be familiar with the expression, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” In other words, if you’re not putting your acquired skills to good use, your proficiency might diminish. For this reason, you want to seek as many opportunities as you can to put those skills into practice while also learning new skills as you go. This will, of course, open up more doors for you and make you a strong job candidate whom no employer would want to pass up.

3. Meet new people

   Many people’s social circles are limited to their family friends and their work friends. Having multiple careers allows you to interact with diverse groups of people who can offer you multiple perspectives and enhance your worldview. Plus, meeting new people offers the possibility of making new friends, which can leave you feeling more personally fulfilled.

4. Interdisciplinary thinking

   When you pursue multiple careers and use different parts of your brain, you expand your thinking and begin to see problems in new ways. By bringing together different perspectives and skills gained from different people, organizations, disciplines, or industries, we can create truly innovative solutions to problems.

5. It makes life more interesting!

   People are very quick to define themselves by their “day jobs.” But let’s face it—you’re way more than that! Breaking out of your 9-5 and taking the chance to do things you’ve always wanted to but felt you haven’t had time to, trying things you never thought you would, and doing things that outright scare you all make life interesting and help you grow professionally, personally, and socially.

Society needs a new structure to accommodate this shift in imagination. A new structure powered by technology but based on humanity and sharing. A world beyond information. A world based on knowledge. Machines are getting smarter, and the careers of today are in a slow but sure march to their extinction. A new world is emerging where people are going to be doing a lot more with their lives and earning their livelihood from various pursuits. Some companies and organizations will stand to support this new world. Our company, Konversai, was built to support this emerging world.

Konversai is the world’s largest database of personal knowledge. This is a place where every single human being has value because of their personal experiences and their personal knowledge. Whether it be your career, hobby, passion, background or simply life lessons learned, Konversai is a place to talk about it. It enables people to connect one-on-one over knowledge exchange conversations via live video. When acting as a provider of knowledge, users are encouraged to charge for their time, as this will contribute to their economic sustainability throughout their entire lifespan and bring seriousness to the conversation. But the same user can and should also be a seeker of knowledge. There are already thousands of seeker listings on Konversai where money is being offered to providers to impart their skills and knowledge. There are also thousands of provider listings where seekers can find what speaks to them. These numbers will grow to tens of thousands and then to millions. Konversai is the knowledge exchange platform of this age, and people of all ages are joining Konversai.

Life is not meant to be lived doing the same thing repeatedly day after day, year after year. With the increased lifespan of future generations, humanity has a chance to truly embrace more of the beauty and complexity this world has to offer. A Konversai user we interviewed recently said, “Information that we learned and guarded in guilds over the past 5000 years is fast becoming irrelevant because everything now is machine searchable to everyone. The information age is over and the age of knowledge is here. The way in the age of intelligent machines in the way of conversations.” Konversai is a platform where users from around the world have the means to be financially, intellectually, and personally satisfied throughout their entire lives. It is not just a business. It is a social movement. Be part of that movement! Join Konversai today.

Written by: Pavita Singh and Sushma Sharma

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