The Slash Career

On being more than one thing, and learning to make sense of it

I came across a phrase recently: the slash career.

Trainer / facilitator / coach

HR professional / project manager

Designer / strategist / writer

At first, they sounded like indecision. Like someone couldn’t quite land on a single identity.

But the more I thought about it the more they started to feel more honest than most job titles.

Because it would seem that very few people are just one thing anymore.

Now there was a time when careers were expected to be clean. Pick a lane, build your expertise and stay in that lane long enough to be known for something. There’s a certain elegance to that model. It’s easy to explain. Easy to package. Easy to reward. But it also belongs to a world where roles were stable and boundaries were clearer.

That world has almost disappeared. Most careers are squiggly

And there may be an upside to that because a slash career gives you range (which is a great book by David Epstein).

Because with range, you learn to look at the same problem from different angles. The facilitator notices something the trainer misses. The coach asks a question the consultant might never think to ask. The project manager brings structure to the creative person. The creative person asks why the structure exists in the first place.

The interesting stuff often happens around the slash, to me it seems it’s where one discipline rubs up against another and something new appears.

There’s resilience in it too. If your entire professional identity rests on being one thing, what happens when that thing changes, is replaced by an AI agent or stops interesting you? A slash career gives you somewhere else to stand.

AND there is a downside. The more slashes you accumulate, the harder you can become to explain.

“What do you do?”

And then comes the slightly breathless list.

I coach / facilitate / train / write / speak / consult / supervise... By which point the questioner is possibly regretting asking.

There is also a danger that a slash career becomes less a career and more a collection. We can keep adding things because they interest us, because somebody offered us some work, or because we happen to be reasonably good at them.

In my observation, the most interesting people with a slash career are able to answer the question what connects the different things I do?

And when they can answer that, the trainer / facilitator / coach doesn't look like three careers. It looks like three different ways of doing the same thing.

So the slash career seems to be evidence that you've stopped believing you have to be only one thing. The challenge is in understanding what holds all the slashes together.