Nouns don't always transfer

I've helped a lot of people identify their transferable skills.

In coaching sessions. In 1:1s, back when I was running teams. In the conversations that happen after a reorg, when someone wants to work out what they've actually got.

Almost everyone answers with nouns. Communication. Leadership. Problem solving. Stakeholder management, if they've been in a big company long enough.

Nobody believes any of it. Not the person hearing it, and not the person saying it.

The nouns fail because they're conclusions with no evidence attached, and because everyone claims the same six.

The evidence exists. It's just filed somewhere nobody thinks to look.

The job description is the wrong document

The instinct is to go through your job description and translate. That's why the nouns come out. A job description was written by someone else, to describe a role rather than a person, usually a year before you got there.

It tells you what the organisation needed. It can't tell the difference between the parts you carried and the parts you merely tolerated, and that distinction is the whole game. It's what predicts whether you'd be any good one level up. It's also what survives when you change industry entirely.

So audit the work, not the role. Then go and look at the unpaid stuff, because that's where the evidence sits that nobody else can claim.

Maintenance is the honest signal

Forget what you're passionate about. Passion is a feeling and feelings are terrible evidence. Anyone can be enthusiastic about something for a fortnight.

Almost nobody keeps doing an unpaid thing for years unless something real is going on underneath. Maintenance costs something every week. It's the closest thing you have to proof.

So list everything you've done consistently, unpaid, for more than two years. Not what you enjoyed. What you kept doing.

Include the unglamorous entries. Running a five a side team. Being the person in the family who books everything. Answering questions in an online forum. The pub quiz. Restoring something in a garage. Teaching a kid to read music.

Then take the nouns out

This is the step people skip, and it's the only one that matters.

For each item, write what you actually do, in verbs, with the difficulty included. Not "organised the pub quiz." Try: writes questions for a a room of mixed ability, holds a weekly commitment for four years, gets thirty people to do something when you have no authority over any of them.

That last one is a genuinely rare skill. It's also invisible on every CV on the market because it gets filed under "hobby."

Then ask the question that turns evidence into an option. Who else needs this, and what do they currently pay for it?

Sometimes the answer is nobody, and that's fine. The pattern across the whole list still tells you something true about how you're wired, and how you're wired travels with you into whatever comes next.

You're not at zero

When a change lands that you didn't choose, the temptation is to start from scratch. New skills, new certification, new plan.

You're not at scratch. You've been quietly assembling assets for years in the gaps around the job you were paid for. I've been writing this newsletter every week for six years, and it took a redundancy to notice it had been a rehearsal all along.

Nobody counted yours because there was never a reason to. There's a reason now.

If getting that work seen is the harder problem, my 15 minute career boost is built for exactly that.

Next week: why one small transaction beats another month of getting ready.