‘The Episodic Career’: Advice From An Award-Winning Journalist On How To Navigate Today’s Ever Changing Job Market

Farai Chideya has led a successful 20-year career as an award-winning author, journalist, professor, and lecturer. She is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, as well as a Senior Writer covering politics and data at ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is “The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption.”

Farai spoke with PowerToFly about how your career can thrive even when you hop from job to job, the importance of prioritizing your health when you are working, and how “cray cray” this election season has been to cover.

Can you explain what you mean by an “episodic career?”

It used to be that a traditional American career consisted of starting off at the bottom at one company, working your way to the top and then voila — retirement! Now people move around throughout their careers. They have episodic careers. It can be done in two ways: one, a hopscotch career path, in which you leap from one profession to another or two, by having simultaneous micro-careers. This can mean leaving one full-fledged career for another related field. For example, for two short periods I left traditional journalism and moved to the communication side of technology companies. Now I have simultaneous micro-careers: I’m an author, professor and short-form journalist. Some people gravitate to the episodic career path and others do it because they have no other choice. Even if they want to, they cannot sustain themselves in a particular role, so they move to the next.

Which one was it for you? What allowed you to make big shifts mid-career?

I’m one of the only people I know who started working at the same time I did, the early ’90s, and has kept working in journalism. It’s because I have moved around and picked up many skills along the way. I’ve worked in print, TV, radio, and I learned HTML so I could run my own website in 1995, which was really early for online content. (The first blog was launched in 1994.). I have tech skills, audio editing skills and have the ability to shift into new areas, like right now learning tools to analyze data. The ability to adapt is what has kept me in the media world.

Looking for a tech job or to hire diverse and experienced women in tech? Visit PowerToFly.

In your book, you talk about the three pillars of an episodic career. Can you share a bit of that here?

So, here’s the big picture about what you need to thrive, in three broad areas:

• Self-knowledge: Start with your heart, and you will find which kinds of workplaces and work styles give you the best shot at success.

• Understanding the job market. Know your field(s) and how the market is locally, nationally, and globally — as well as how it’s evolving.

• Emotional resilience: No one, not even billionaires or centimillionaires, has lived a life without setbacks. And no one, not even the long-term unemployed or people with life, family, or health challenges, is shut out of meaningful work.

Regarding self-knowledge, I was working as a radio host for NPR, which was great in many ways but the schedule for part of my time there was awful. I had to be at work at 4am, and my body really didn’t like that. (There’s all sorts of research about the circadian rhythms that our bodies are used to. Some people who do night-time shift work are fine; others get sick from it.) In any case, the show eventually ended in 2009 as the company made cuts during the Great Recession. Later I had a chance to apply for another host job that would have had the same hours. I chose not to, partly because I know I’m not someone who does well on that time shift. Everyone reacts differently to different types of work shifts and stress, so know what works for you. That’s just one form of self-knowledge, and we get into other specifics in the book with a tool called the Work/Life Matrix.

Understanding the job market can mean the difference between thriving, surviving, and not even scraping by. Technological automation is eliminating not just blue-collar jobs but white-collar ones as well. Take HR — the human relations and staffing departments at big companies. Some HR functions have become automated, and many other companies use tools like LinkedIn as part of their HR vetting process. So, if you’re in HR, you will want to learn what platforms and software are important… and retrain in them as new ones emerge.

Finally, emotional resilience is like cartilage. Cartilage helps keeps your joints working, making you more physically flexible. Emotional resilience keeps your mind and spirit flexible, able to adapt to whatever the world throws at you — including periods of unemployment; downturns in a major industries; or even the stress of unexpected success (and yes, that too can cause stress).

Many women take breaks in their careers to take care of their families. Can you speak to how that affects their long term goals?

We need to have a better balance of work and family, and we need to start talking about it more. Many people do not have the means to easily integrate both work and family into their lives. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to work/family issues because I’m waiting to adopt. I’m doing everything that I can to make sure that I am ready. I’m working two jobs — at FiveThirtyEight.com and NYU. I’ve tried to time the process so that I have the flexibility to ramp down and have more time to take care of my child. Meanwhile, I’m working a lot and saving money like a squirrel saves nuts. I’m lucky that I can just adjust my workflow and save money in order to take care of my future kid. Not everyone can.

Do you think tech can help us achieve this balance?

Tech is a mixed bag, but it can work for women who want to work and balance caregiving. There’s a very accomplished reporter who I know who is well respected in her field. She works from a ranch in the middle of nowhere. Tech made that possible. She has a balanced life. But she is in the middle of nowhere. When you work remotely you can find social interaction through social media or through your social networks. You can create a sense of community online.

You talk about job related stress and exercise. Most people can relate to this quote from your book: “At times I have sacrificed my health and wellness for my job.”

In my case, when I was working at NPR I had to wake up at 3 a.m. My body was not built for that. it. I was talking Ambien to fall asleep which encouraged me to binge eat. I’m a stress eater. I was personally unhappy. It threw off my relationship. I was getting sick. I gained 40 pounds in four years, much of which I have now lost because I realized how precious being active is to me. I love hiking, biking, and kayaking.

So I’d say to all of us: you have a choice. How many years off your life is your work taking from you? Consider this from a recent Washington Post article, “A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans’ life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups.” There’s a different set of risks to consider, for example if you are a less-educated worker or a more-educated one… but there are challenges in both cases. You can remain conscious of the health risks, be unemployed or overworked. But you have to take your health into consideration.

You have covered every presidential election since 1996. How does this election cycle compare?

The phrase “cray cray” comes to mind — and here I’m mainly talking about the media and how we have not, in my opinion, adapted quickly enough to the realities of this campaign to give people factual, vetted, non-sycophantic, non-hysterical news about the 2016 election.

There’s definitely a rise of populism — whether it’s a xenophobic form of nativist populism (also a force in Europe, for example The National Front party in France), inclusive populism, angry populism, or hopeful populism. (Voters can embody more than one of those types.) There is clearly a revolt and reckoning with the idea of the political and economic establishment. Voters across the spectrum are asking politicians: Don’t you see this system is broken? Why aren’t you fixing it? (And: often the most passionate are people who say, on seeing their candidate on TV or in person, “You’re the one who can fix it.”) But the level of political rhetoric in 2016 is also more confrontational, more stereotypic, and less factual (I started my career as a fact-checker) than any election I’ve covered.

Do you have any other advice to share?

Gloria Steinem once said to me, what holds you together is the companionship of people who really care about you. Women who fall through the cracks are the ones who do not have social support. After a layoff, I took a short-term sublet at a friend’s house as I was moving back to New York. I paid rent, though not a lot, and I wanted to live with someone who would talk to me and kick me in the butt when I was feeling down. When I shortly moved into my own apartment, I felt the experience was a great transition. Social support cannot be understated in this economy.

It’s also important to be kind to yourself. No one has a road map. Not everything is within our control. Do the best with what you have. Let go of blame and shame. Shaming and blaming is not good emotionally or in the more clinical world of job-creation and job-search. The resilient people I profile are ones who face themselves, all the good and the bad, and decide they are worth taking care of. That again returns to the idea that healthy work, and the financial and retirement planning that go along with it, are linked to self-care.

Cathy Sharick is the Executive Editor of PowerToFly, formerly the Managing Editor of Time. The mother of three lives in New Jersey.

Make hiring women in tech, and across digital, your competitive advantage. Sign up with PowerToFly today.

More From PowerToFly: Mark Luckie On ‘Why It’s OK To Say We Have A Black People Meet-Up Group’