Nearly 20 years ago, I was finishing my MBA while working a full-time job—as a director of training at a large regional bank—with an infant at home. One evening after class, my marketing professor pulled me aside to ask if I’d ever thought of teaching a course.
I wasn’t sure that was even possible with my full-time role. But his question made me realize that two of my coworkers were already adjunct professors, and others consulted on the side, spoke at conferences, or ran small businesses.
With a hefty day care bill staring me down, I approached my employer about teaching at the university. I framed it as a win for them, too, because I could live out their stated value of community involvement. My students would be ideal candidates for our retail bank branches, strengthening the talent pipeline. By teaching management courses, I would sharpen my skills in leadership and strategic planning frameworks that would be useful as a leader. They agreed.
That was the beginning of what I now call a multidimensional career, one where your skills, purpose, and income streams extend beyond a single corporate role.
At the time, I thought I was just being resourceful, but in hindsight, I was building something that has become a critical career strategy in an era of disruption. In 2025 alone, 1.1 million Americans were laid off, 54% more than the year before. The World Economic Forum projects that 22% of all jobs will be structurally disrupted by 2030.
The instinct during this kind of disruption is to double down on your current role and make yourself indispensable within the four walls of your organization, which we are seeing with the rise of job hugging. However, the leaders who will navigate the next decade of disruption must build enough dimension into their careers so they have transferrable skills and options when unexpected organizational changes occur.
To be clear, a multidimensional career is not the same as fractional work, where a leader leaves full-time employment to split their time as an executive across multiple organizations. It’s also different from a portfolio career, which encourages you to build a swath of experience inside your organization. A multidimensional career is built alongside your full-time position, outside of your primary employer, and it makes you a more creative, connected, and skilled leader inside your organization.
In my coaching practice, executives who have built multidimensional careers bring back broader networks, cross-industry pattern recognition, and fresh creative energy. This intentional career expansion makes you more valuable in your primary role and is not another name for quiet quitting or a pass for checked-out leaders moonlighting on company time.
If you’re considering adding dimension to your career, here’s how to do it in a way that strengthens your nine-to-five while building something purposeful alongside it.
VET THE INVESTMENT FIRST
Many of my clients are drawn to the recognition and personal brand growth that comes with a multidimensional career, especially since they see leaders speaking on stages, serving on boards, or running a small side business. What we rarely see behind those success stories is the self-doubt, the calendar jockeying, and the critique that comes with embarking in a visible new role. If your primary motivation is visibility, the inevitable friction of building something new will wear you down long before you build any momentum.
When I asked my client Casey, a senior director in agricultural financing, why she wanted to build a speaking career on top of her corporate role, she didn’t talk about money or visibility. She said, “I want to inspire young women to take leadership roles in agribusiness.” As Casey’s speaking profile grew, her presence on stage drove brand awareness and positioned her company as a thought leader in their industry. Her CEO began moving more corporate speaking and thought leadership off his plate and onto hers. Her purpose amplified her company’s profile in the marketplace and fulfilled her personal mission.
Before you invest your limited time and energy in building something new, apply the rigor you’d bring to any business case. What outcomes are you hoping to create? What problem will you solve and who benefits? How and why will you sustain this commitment when the initial excitement fades and the real work begins?
LEVERAGE YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
With AI automating more tasks every day, the skills that make you distinctly human are your biggest competitive advantage and travel with you no matter where your career goes.
My client Jennifer, a technical project leader at one of the world’s largest delivery and supply chain companies, thought her skills were too niche to monetize outside her day job. Then she started a vending machine side venture for passive income. Her project management instincts kicked in. She analyzed customer demographics, purchase patterns, and restock rates so effectively that she designed innovative new product distribution methods. The vending ownership company hired her as a part-time consultant to train other operators on her approach. Jennifer gained a dimension to her career she never expected, and she brought back valuable new perspectives on operations and customer analytics to her corporate role.
To start your own competitive skills audit, reflect on areas where coworkers or peers frequently request your help. Pay attention to the type of work you find effortless that others struggle with, and notice where your energy surges and you lose track of time because you are in flow. Those are signals pointing toward your transferable advantage. Once you’ve identified what lifts your energy, discern where these skills could create value outside your organization and where they could be brought back to your nine-to-five role with an innovative new perspective.
FRAME IT AS A WIN FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION
While it feels risky to walk into your manager’s office and say, “I want to do something outside this role,” the executives I’ve coached were pleasantly surprised by how well their proposition was received after they clearly communicated the value proposition.
The data supports this. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 77% of employers globally plan to develop new skills in their workforce by 2030. Organizations are already investing in continuous development, so the key is to frame your growth in terms your company cares about.
When I had that conversation two decades ago about teaching at the university, I didn’t lead with my financial situation or my personal ambition. I led with the talent pipeline boost, the community involvement alignment, and the strategic leadership tools I’d bring back. That framing made it easy for my employer to say yes.
My client Melanie showed what this can look like at the highest level. When she began speaking at conferences while she was a CFO, her presence on stage drove in leads from clients who wanted to hire her company and a record number of applications from potential employees. The organization was so impressed by the results that they invested in a dedicated marketing budget for her speaking efforts and made it a key business strategy.
When you have this conversation, lead with the value you’ll bring back. Make the case concrete and state the specific capability or connection to be gained and how that maps to goals and strategies that matter to your organization.
SUBTRACT BEFORE ADDING
Here’s where most advice about building a multidimensional career falls apart. Many articles tell you to “find more time” or “maximize your mornings” or “leverage AI to free up bandwidth.” The truth is that building a multidimensional career requires you to subtract first. Before you add a single new commitment, structural capacity must be established in your existing life.
I would caution against assuming that AI will create that capacity for you. A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, published in the Harvard Business Review, tracked AI adoption at a 200-person tech company and found that rather than reducing workloads, AI tools intensified them. Employees took on broader task scope, blurred the line between work and recovery time, and juggled more tasks simultaneously. Rigor in refining your systems and support is necessary to foster bandwidth. My client Casey needed childcare coverage for travel days and recovery time to catch up on her day job responsibilities when she returned. She needed to set boundaries and create work systems so she could make this a sustainable career strategy without sacrificing her health or her family.
For executives managing large teams, subtraction often starts at the organizational level. To build structural capacity, start by auditing where your time actually goes for two weeks. Identify the meetings, tasks, and decisions that could be delegated to your team. Be honest about which ones you’re holding onto because it produces a “helper’s high” from fixing and solving. Don’t overlook your household responsibilities to identify what can be shared or outsourced. The leaders I’ve seen build the most successful multidimensional careers mastered delegation and boundary setting, which are also necessary for executive leadership.
Twenty years after that MBA professor asked me a simple question, I’ve built a career with multiple dimensions, including coaching, speaking, writing, and teaching. Some of those dimensions have evolved over time, and some have ebbed and flowed depending on client demands. Having multiple ways I can serve my purpose and my clients has helped me play the long game as an entrepreneur as the economy changes, corporate preferences change, and new trends emerge.
This combination protects me from a major corporate client or industry shift. It makes me a better, more relevant leader for the organizations I serve because I have global client perspectives in a variety of settings. Uncertainty will continue to reshape executive careers, and the leaders who navigate it well will look beyond a single role and add career dimension—so that their expertise and potential aren’t contingent on any one organization’s survival.