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Career Directions for Researchers

Self-employment and portfolio careers

Understand options for being your own boss, working as a freelancer and working in multiple roles.

Entrepreneurship, which could include self-employment, freelancing or a combination of these alongside employed roles (in what is commonly referred to as a portfolio career) can be a popular career pathway for early career researchers. Researchers develop some of the most important entrepreneurial skills needed for success in start-up businesses and self-employment, for example creativity, problem-solving, leadership and innovation, whilst also possessing a high level of expertise in their chosen field. Whilst these skills and knowledge can be utilised by researchers to branch out and set up their own business, they can also be applied to develop within all careers – the skills that make entrepreneurs successful (‘entrepreneurial skills’) are often the transferable skills most highly sought after by employers.

Defining self-employment, freelancing and portfolio careers

Self-employment, freelancing and portfolio careers are all ways that you can incorporate ways of being your own boss into your career, but all refer to slightly different working patterns. You can find definitions of each term below:

Self-employment refers to someone who owns and runs their own business, rather than working for someone else, or works as a freelancer.

Freelancing is a specific form or self-employment and refers to someone who works in a flexible way, as and when they choose, offering their skills, talents or expertise to clients for a negotiable fee. They often work from home and for multiple clients at one time.

Prospects has more advice on freelancing.

Although definitions vary, a portfolio career often refers to someone having multiple strands to their career, typically through combining forms of employment with self-employment. This could for example refer to an early career researcher who works part-time as an academic whilst spending the rest of their time as a freelance consultant in their area of expertise. Often a portfolio career is a choice, in order to pursue multiple interests or multiple income streams in your field of expertise. A portfolio career is not typically associated with taking multiple roles due to financial necessity, which is probably more associated with the term ‘gig economy’ used to describe the growing prevalence of people working short-term, often precarious roles, to supplement income.

Careershifters has a useful guide to deciding if a portfolio career is right for you.

The importance of entrepreneurial skills for your career

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, 2018: p19) describe how a person’s skills, qualities and attributes combine to produce an entrepreneurial mindset:

  • self-aware of personality and social identity
  • motivated to achieve personal ambitions and goals
  • self-organised, flexible and resilient
  • curious towards new possibilities for creating value
  • responsive to problems and opportunities by making new connections
  • able to go beyond perceived limitations and achieve results
  • tolerant of uncertainty, ambiguity, risk, and failure
  • sensitive to personal values, such as ethical, social, diversity and environmental awareness

Being enterprising and being an entrepreneur are not the same things; not all researchers need to know how to set up their own business, but they can benefit from an enterprising mindset. Experiences and opportunities to develop creativity, cope with uncertainty, negotiate and solve problems can develop an entrepreneurial mindset, without needing to have set up your own business. Being enterprising can be applied across all areas of education and professional life. In fact, the term intrapreneurship applies to the capacity of employees within organisations to utilise their entrepreneurial mindset to drive innovation and business growth. You can read more about this on Stanford Online.

Support for research students

Current Cardiff University research students can access a wide range of support from Student Futures to help grow a business idea, become a freelancer or develop entrepreneurial skills, including 1:1 business support, networking opportunities, bootcamps, competitions and detailed online advice. You can read more about the support we offer on the student intranet.

If you are a current staff member, you can find helpful advice online about working for yourself and setting up a business on the Business Wales and Gov.uk websites. Research and Innovation Services can also support you if you are currently involved in producing commercially valuable products, services or processes through your research.

Further resources

Use the below resources to explore this topic further: