You are more than just a job title

One of the first things career coaches tend to come across and work with clients on is disentangling the who someone is and what they do.

Truth is that the longer we spend in the workforce, the closer we tend to assimilate who we are as a person with organisations we work for, the job we do, even the job title we’ve often randomly been given.

Over the years I’ve had some really awful, long winded and frankly weird job titles that appeared on structure charts that made little sense to anyone and seemed to bear very little resemblance to what I actually did.  

Some of those entirely weird and arbitrary job titles had hysterical side results because the acronyms formed but seemingly random combinations of words produced some hilarious unintended side effects.  

Yes, I’ve actually worked for a GIT (which in British English is really not complimentary word for someone) and I have absolutely been through a restructure where the proposed team and division’s acronym was POO (or Poop for my US readers).   Go figure.   GIT stayed.  Thankfully POO got edited before the proverbial hit the fan.

Your job title is not who you are

Doing a bit of research on this I stumbled upon American Genius’ list of stupidest job titles.  I’ll not go through all of them but these are a few that I really liked.

-        Innovation Evangelist; hey sing it from the rooftops

-        Happiness Concierge; turn every dark cloud to a rainbow

-        Conversion Optimisation Wrangler – frankly anything wrangling sounds painful

-        Brand Warrior – dig out the war paint

-        Software Ninjaneer – the ninja superlative really does it

So who are you really?

OK so a bit of fun there for good effect but stop for a moment and think who are you?

If you find yourself for just an instant inserting your company name or job title into that answer then we have an issue when it comes to careers and career redesign.

Ideally what we want is for you to understand the skills you have and the value that’s created by others through those skills.  Often instead what comes out at networking events to the “who are you” question is something like;

“Hi I’m Michael, I work for SCD Accounting, we’re a firm of management accountants.   We’re actually number 3 in the eastern territory specialising in invoice factoring and dedicated to customer satisfaction amongst mid-corps.   I’m the senior director of account rationalisation and optimisation, I’ve a team of three……”   after wakening yourself from the onsetting slumber, you eventually muster a question like - yes but who are you?  

Yet we do this all the time.  If you’re at a networking event and asked who are you, how frequently have you used your job title, position, the purpose of your company way before you’ve landed who you are and what you actually do let alone why it’s something you enjoy doing.

Our instinct for some reason is to act as if we’re there to read out the company’s website and hierarchy structure on command. If you do this, you signal two things

a) your symbiotic attachment to your organisation which may be endearing but it’s aso signalling to others your close identity with your organisation and if you’re really wanting a change of scenary, it’s unlikely anyone will seek to rock the boat with someone who is indicating where I am is who I am.

b) your uniqueness is ambiguous and your personal value add, indistinct. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job title that is generally replicated in exactly the same way in different organisations then you’re a bit more fortunate but in our interactions we always, repeat always need to be helping people understand our uniqueness and value add - whether you’re looking to stay where you are or move on - relationships are based on human connections.

You are more than an extension of a job title or the function of the company you work for

It’s very common to the who are you question that our tendency lurches to describe a company, a position or a hierarchy.   It’s also pretty common that this is the way we see ourselves, as some kind of symbiotic extension of a company we work for.

Coaches who work primarily with those who have been laid off or made redundant often find one of their primary tasks is helping the client to detach and disassemble themselves from the company’s that’s said I no longer want you.  Because we spend so much time at work that our identity becomes aligned to the company, the job title, the job, the status, the team or whatever.

And when that is forced to come to an end, we’re left bereft without a real understanding of ourselves.

Skill stacking -  your uniqueness comes from many places

The more years you spend in the workplace the more exposure you have to different experiences and the more skills you pick up.  In your present job you may be using 70% of the skills carried forward from your last job.   But those 30% are still with you.

And you’re likely to be learning, developing, training constantly and picking up new skills.

And how about the work you do as a soccer coach at the weekends, or working as an unpaid volunteer for a not-for-profit, or as a Dad, or as a local councillor, or the old beaten up car you’re fixing up in the garage or the way friends and neighbours call on your DIY skills, or your awesome reputation as a star baker in the family kitchen and so on and so on.

You will have many more skills than just those you practice in your existing role.

But often when we consider who we are, we leave all those behind and we start with company, job title, position in hierarchy, responsibilities.   It undersells the proposition and more importantly it does not convey the unique combination of skills that is you.

When we hunt for new roles we innately undersell our unique career stack

Superconductors is the name of Derek Loudermilk’s book in which he describes the notion of skill stacking.

The traditional way of finding a new role is you look on LinkedIn or Indeed or Glassdoor and you see a job advert and you look at what they want and you consider how you match up against the specification.  If it seems a match, you apply, you show them how you match their requirements and hope for the best.

On the other side the employer has a different expectation.   They hope to meet some interesting a new people who have a minimum set of skills but the employer has no expectation of a maximum skill set.  But in the majority of applications they get a narrow view of individuals who tell them all about what’s in the job advert but little of their broader skill set.

As a technique it fails to meet everyone’s needs – it means multi skilled individuals don’t apply for jobs they don’t feel they are a perfect fit for and employers don’t get to meet people who bring more to the party than what it set out in the job advert.

The concept of skill stacking is your individual uniqueness.  A bit like a recipe book of ingredients.   If I have ten skills and I only use a specific seven of them in combination then I have a range of possibilities of what I can do.  

If I take a different seven out of ten skills then I will get a different combination of things that are needed.

Major and minor skills – measuring different ingredients to make the perfect cake.

If you’re baking a cake, even if you are the worst baker in the whole world you know that it’s unlikely if your cake required seven ingredients that it’ll be made by putting the exact same amount of everything together and hoping for the best.

And so it is with jobs.  Every job requires skills to different levels of mastery.   From major to minor.

If you’re a Java engineer for example your majors will be in Java, possibly some other coding languages.  But you may have minor skills in design, dev-ops, QA.    And that combination of skills you have mastery of and skills you have a good working knowledge of produces nuances in the ingredients within your skill stack that’s interesting to employers.

Take our Java engineer.  To a big company with huge teams, it may be sufficient in itself to just be awesome at Java and maybe interesting if you’ve also experience with Java React even though you’ve not mastered it because it gives that employer flexibility. 

But to a smaller company that relies on people to lean into different parts of a lifecycle, if you’ve got skills in Java but your experience background has exposed you to design and testing – even those these are minor skills, your unique skill stack may be more useful than just Java skills alone.

Or maybe you’re in finance, but in the context of working in a small company where everyone has to do a bit of everything, you’ve also got skills in consultancy, in pitching, in data manipulation and presentation.  

And don’t forget the human skills

And your unique mix of course is not made up solely of your knowledge of tax codes, employment law, coding languages or the intricacies of excel macros that still elude me.   Most of our work involves an interaction with other humans so our ability to relate to others, handle setbacks, work through conflict, generate interesting and opposing views and so forth are also a critical part of our unique stack.

TAKE ACTION

Take a sheet of paper and create three columns.

In column 1 take your professional occupations for the past five years and write down the technical skills and knowledge that you’ve gained through the different roles, projects and experiences that you’ve undertaken.  Forget the job titles, walk yourself through the experience of working in those roles to bring out the things you can do.

In column 2 think about those same projects but the interactions that were needed to make success happen with other people.  What human behavioural skills came from these – influencing, negotiation, presenting, rationalising insight, handling conflict, motivating people, handling setbacks.  Anything and everything.

In column 3 think of your life outside your major occupation.   What have you picked up as skills from these things you do.   Think hard about why you do these things since typically you don’t get paid for them so I guess you must be getting some other kind of satisfaction and enjoyment or fulfilment from them.

Your unique skill stack

Whenever you feel that urge to revisit or redesign your career and prepare for that next move just those three columns alone will show you that in your store cupboard you have lots of ingredients and since those ingredients can be mixed together into different combinations and quantities to create entirely unique recipes, you have a lot more to offer the world than your job title.