Pivoting careers isn't a competency problem
It's all about how we tell the story of behaviors vs. skills
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My career is the direct beneficiary of people giving me some pretty big chances. My first dramaturgy gig, my first branding job, flipping from an agency into a tech company—none of those were roles I had prior experience in or a resume tailored to.
But all of them were things I already had the skills for. I knew I could do it; other people did not.
That’s a gap I bet a lot of people are trying to bridge right now.
The circumstances that led to those folks giving me a chance are, of course, a combination of things: luck, privilege, smarts, timing, etc. Let’s say all of those things are the equivalent of me reaching across the gap toward the people whose faith in me I needed. And I think a really important factor in them deciding to reach back is—despite how this is going to sound—the fact that I am “good at talking.”
I don’t necessarily mean that I’m good at bullshitting, though a career in VC-backed tech will also make you pretty well-versed in that. I mean I’m good at expressing myself with both accuracy and eloquence. I can tell a story. This is a skill, and it’s one I honed through a lot of repetition and encouragement as a theater kid who realized that what she liked more than being on stage was telling the people on stage what to do—and then went and got a whole-ass degree about that.
I’ve been thinking about how I did (and didn’t) bridge those gaps as I contemplate this post on career pivots and non-linear careers by Kristen Lowe—because she’s joining us for a free online event next Wednesday about identifying your success currencies! (If you want to hear more about creative folks making big career pivots, check out Allison Stadd 🥁 ‘s newsletter!)
The idea of success currencies—the various costs that you’re uniquely capable of bearing—comes into play when we’re talking about career pivots. Because pivoting, or just pursuing a non-linear career in general, requires you to pay a very specific price:
It requires you and your skills and accomplishments and experience to become temporarily illegible.
As Lowe explains:
It is needlessly hard to hold onto the conviction that you can change your career and succeed when you have nothing to tether that belief to. Pivots require you to develop the brazen confidence and self-trust to believe in your potential in the absence of any confirmation that you should. In stepping away from a world you know, even if it’s one you’re dying to escape, and into the unknown of a new career, you render your achievements and, in many ways, yourself illegible to others. While that doesn’t invalidate the merit of what you’ve done up until that point, it does sit you down face-to-face with the confronting truth that, for many of us, our self-confidence rests not on our achievements but precariously on the foundation of others’ ability to understand those achievements as a sign of what we’re worth.
The problem isn’t that you’re not good, it’s that you only learned how to explain why you’re good in the words and symbols that were most legible to the people in the world you’re trying to leave, and in order to make it out, you have to get to the bottom of who you are as a professional and explain what makes you one of one in language that anyone can understand.
Learning to do this takes time and practice, but nobody in the world has better insight into what you’re capable of than you. You are the world’s leading authority on your past, your skills, and your potential, and if the story you’re telling about why you know you can succeed isn’t landing, you don’t need more spin or new language to make you legible; you need more truth. You need to look honestly, discerningly, and kindly at your career history and your achievements to identify the truest story of why you’re excellent and what that means you can do.
- Kristen Lowe, Non-Linear Careers: A Personal Diatribe
In other words: The metrics that once proved your value are no longer the most important. The title that made people nod approvingly now gets a blank stare. The industry shorthand disappears. All your credentials, promotions, and other prestige markers that once served as evidence of your competence suddenly stop translating.
For example, your prospective new boss at, say, a non-profit organization might gloss right over your impressive demand generation stats (“+136% pipeline YoY”), but your ability to analyze a complex digital system and get the right eyeballs to click in the right places to get the right information for them is going to be critical to that non-profit’s mission.
You haven’t become less capable. Your skills are still there, and they’re still relevant. But in the pivot, you simply lose access to the language you used to explain your capability. So you have to return to your story, and make it a universal story, that anyone can understand.
And, paradoxically, the way you make a story universal is to make it personal.
I’ll explain. Or rather, I’ll let writer James Joyce explain:
“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
When you tell a “particular” story with personal intimacy and authenticity, people are able to recognize themselves in it. An Irish person telling a true story about being down on their luck and navigating Dublin is likely to be more legible to an American down on their luck navigating New York than if that same Irish person tried to write a story about being in New York.
Ya get me?
People connect with the feelings, not the context. So here’s a few ways to tap into the personal and particular if you’re telling the story of your pivot.
All of these principles point toward the same idea: people don’t buy your résumé; they buy your theory of yourself. When you’re making a pivot, the details of your previous context often matter less than what they reveal about who you are or your patterns of behavior.
1. STOP describing where and how you did the work. START describing what the work proves about you.
Most people tell career stories by leading with context:
“I was a Vice President of Client Success at Blah-di-Blah, Inc, managing a team of 20 people in a fast-growing SaaS company.”
But context is often the least transferable part of your experience when you’re making a pivot. It only matters to people who already understand and value that world.
Instead, ask: What does this experience prove about me?
For example: “I’ve repeatedly been the person whom organizations trust to build consensus among competing stakeholders and turn abstract ideas into something people can actually act on.”
The company, title, and industry—the context—are just set dressing. The pattern is the story.
Most advice about success focuses on what you’re good at. But what if the bigger question is: What costs are you uniquely willing to tolerate?
2. STOP listing achievements. START explaining what those achievements meant to you.
It’s totally natural that when we’re trying to prove ourselves, we recite accomplishments as if they speak for themselves: I launched [product], I managed [project], I grew revenue by [BIG%].
But alllll of that becomes much more interesting when you explain why it matters to you personally. (Or why some things didn’t matter to you!)
For example: “The thing I was proudest of wasn’t growing the business by 15%. It was discovering that I love collaborating with people across disciplines.”
People aren’t hiring your accomplishments—or rather, the right people aren’t. They’re hiring your motivations, your standards, your values, and your relationship to your work.
3. STOP arguing that you can do the job. START demonstrating the kind of person you are.
Again, totally natural in a pivot to try to prove we’re qualified enough. But if you don’t already have proof that you know how to do something, then the question for yourself becomes:
“How do I make them understand why I’m the kind of person who [insert critical function here]?”
Maybe you’re the kind of person who becomes obsessed with understanding the root cause of complex problems. Or you take enormous pride in producing excellent work or promoting a unified team. Maybe you have a particular tolerance to uncertainty! (More on that in our event!)
Basically, you’re trying to find statements and examples that highlight the qualities that explain why you’ve succeeded before and why you’ll succeed again.
Over to you…
We’d love to hear the stories of your pivots! What made a difference in navigating the change, and what did you think would, but didn’t? And if you liked this post, consider joining us at our event Wednesday with Kristen Lowe to identify your unique tolerances—another great starting point for telling a compelling story about yourself.
But wait! There’s more…
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