A systemic coaching qualification gives you the mindset, tools, and reflective practice to design a portfolio career with purpose and resilience so it’s not just a collection of jobs, but a coherent working life.
The 9-5 job for life isn’t quite dead, but since the pandemic, more and more people have been rethinking how they work – and a portfolio career is increasingly the answer they land on.
It’s easy to see the appeal: flexibility, work that plays to your strengths, and the chance to pursue projects that genuinely interest you. But there are trade-offs – less financial predictability, the self-discipline needed to manage your own time and pipeline, and the hassle of having to market yourself. Often.
If you’re drawn to this way of working, how do you set yourself up to do it well? One answer that might surprise you: develop your systemic coaching skills.
What is a portfolio career?
A portfolio career is a way of working where, instead of a single full-time role with one employer, you combine multiple income streams, roles, or projects simultaneously. In practice, that might mean fractional leadership work alongside consultancy, writing, or speaking. The mix looks different for everyone, but the principle is the same: you design your working life around a range of complementary activities rather than a single job title.
What’s driving the rise of portfolio careers
Worker priorities have shifted significantly since the pandemic. Flexibility, wellbeing, and meaningful work have moved up the wish list, often ahead of financial reward. A study of over 4,000 UK workers by Mercer found that wellbeing has overtaken cost of living as the foremost employee concern, with physical health, mental health, and work-life balance at the forefront.
At the same time, organisations are rethinking how they access talent – with a growing trend towards skills-first approaches and an explosion in fractional leadership, where senior professionals work embedded across several clients without the cost of a full-time hire.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 puts it starkly: on average, two-fifths of existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. The skills they put a premium on? Resilience, flexibility, and agility. Portfolio careers, done well, are a structural response to exactly this.
Why systemic thinking is essential for a portfolio career
Most people planning a portfolio career ask themselves: what skills do I have, and how do I monetise them? Which is reasonable but not enough.
Work takes up a huge portion of most people’s lives. How you work, who you work with, and what you’re working towards touches on identity, relationships, values, and purpose. These things don’t operate in isolation. They’re interconnected and systemic.
Peter Hawkins and Eve Turner, in their book Systemic Coaching, note that large organisations will be employing fewer people over the next five to ten years, while needing to partner with ever more complex groups of stakeholders. The challenge, they argue, is to shift focus from what is internal to the individual or organisation, to the connections and partnerships that are external. That shift is exactly what a good portfolio career requires.
What does a systemic coaching qualification give you?
A habit of standing back.
At MurphyBishop, we talk about the systemic mindset as: stand back, look again, make a move. For portfolio working, this is essential. The pace of change means you need to keep your sights on new opportunities and risks simultaneously. Noticing – really noticing what’s shifting in your market, your network, and yourself – becomes a core skill.
Clarity about identity.
One of the trickiest parts of a portfolio career is answering: “so, what do you do?” Systemic coaching helps you sit with complexity rather than forcing it into a tidy box. It also helps you find the coherent thread that runs through everything you do.
A future-back perspective.
Most career planning works forward from where you are now. Hawkins’ concept of future-back thinking flips this: start with the future you want to create – for your clients, your community, your field – and work backwards to understand who you need to become. It’s a far more powerful frame than simply asking what feels achievable right now.
Outside-in awareness.
Another Hawkins concept, rather than asking only “what do I want?”, systemic coaching trains you to ask, “what does the world around me need, and where do I fit?” This completely reframes self-promotion. Instead of the uncomfortable task of selling yourself, you’re articulating how you serve a genuine need. For many people, that shift makes marketing themselves feel far less like an ick – and far more like a natural part of the work.
A framework for reflective practice.
MurphyBishop’s 3 Ps model – systemic perspectives (what you see and assume), systemic presence (how you show up), and systemic practice (how you work) – gives you a structure to audit not just what you’re doing, but how and why. It’s invaluable when you’re managing multiple clients and roles without an organisational structure to hold it all together.
Is a systemic coaching qualification good for your career?
Yes – and not just as a way of thinking more clearly about your portfolio. It’s a meaningful strand of it.
Coaching is one of the most transferable professional skills there is. It scales with your experience, translates across sectors, and is something organisations increasingly need as they navigate the complexity and change that’s driving the shift towards portfolio working in the first place.
Ask yourself a systemic question
A portfolio career isn’t just a different way of organising your work. It’s a different way of being a professional – one that requires you to think clearly about purpose, navigate uncertainty, and stay alert to a constantly shifting landscape.
Systemic coaching skills don’t just help you coach others through that. They help you live it yourself.
The question isn’t just “what shall I offer?” It’s “who do I need to become, and what do I need to see, to make this work sustainably?” That’s a systemic question. And it deserves a systemic answer.
- Ready to explore systemic coaching? Find out more about our Diploma in Systemic Coaching and how it could be the foundation of your portfolio career.
- Read more: What is systemic coaching?
