Book review: One Person/Multiple Careers

If you feel you can do more with your life than just your current Nine-to-Five role, Marci Alboher’s new book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success may be for you.  Alboher has collected the stories of a myriad of successful slash careers, a collection that will convince you that you, too, can do it.

Once you decide you want to pursue a slash career, though, there are better books than this one to help you with the details.  More on that later.

A slash career is one that includes more than one role at a time.  Alboher, for example, lists her roles as author/speaker/coach.  Her inspiration for the book was Angela Williams, lawyer/Baptist minister, and one of the stories in the book is about Mary Mazzio, lawyer/filmmaker/mother.  You get the idea.

Alboher gives us well written stories that show how her subjects found greater health and satisfaction by adding a slash role to their work lives.  At the end of the first half, I thought, "Yeah, I get it.  I can see how a slash career could be much more rewarding than just a series of single careers."

The second half of the book was a bit disappointing, however.  This is where Alboher attempts to give us tips for how to make a slash career work. And this is where I don't think the book measures up.

In spite of the subtitle ("A New Model for Work/Life Success"), Alboher does not present a coherent model for success with slash careers.  And many of her tips are simple common sense.  I guess I was looking for more concrete advice than I got out of this section.

That having been said, the real value of this book is in the stories of people who are succeeding as slashes.  I'd recommend buying two books to help you with your slash career move.  First, buy Alboher's book to feed your emotions and convince you it can be done.  And then, turn to Susan Strayer's The Right Job, Right Now: The Complete Toolkit for Finding Your Perfect Career for a user-friendly career action model, and for advice that will guide you down the road to slash success.

When you get discouraged, read another story or two in Alboher's book.  When you need to figure out what to do next, consult Strayer's book.

Kent Blumberg, manufacturing executive/author/coach