Triangulating our skill position
Ping the towers of your peers to understand your true location. You might be farther than you think.
Triangulating our position
At times, the reasons why someone gets stuck is a lack of definition of where they are truly at. Consider being lost at sea, or in the woods. If you only have one clear landmark to say “I’m here”, but you maybe don’t know how far away it is, you won’t know your position.
A person can stand in New York City and feel like the Empire State Building is much closer than it truly is. It just seems a few blocks away. Once you ask a local or check a map, you realize quickly that you might need to take a cab, or the subway. How close we are to something can be deceiving depending on how big it is in relation to everything else around us.
If you have a few landmarks it becomes much easier to understand more exactly where you are, although anyone with a GPS driven map function on their phone knows sometimes there’s a pause in the delivery of data.
This all goes for positioning in a city, in the woods, and with skills.
Imagine you are in a field all you see are trees around you, it might be pretty difficult for people to find you if you said “a field, surrounded by trees”. But if you look and see you have mountains to your right, you can hear a river to your left, and the sun is front of you, you now already have a better idea of your position.
Now let’s think about that in terms of skills, particularly those that can get caught up in the grey zone and/or be a skill or a role. We’ll choose project management because it can be vastly different depending on company, industry, or needs.
You are standing in the zone of your skills. You tell others that you see around you ‘resource allocation’, ‘client coordination’, and ‘data analysis’. Now, we are getting into a point that’s used in navigation, we are essentially drawing a triangle around ourselves and landmarks to where we are. We are centering in on where we are much more clearly.
Now, someone else might say ‘resource allocation’, ‘client coordination’, and ‘communication’ which puts them near you but in a different location.
Why is this important?
If we don’t know where we are in relation to others, we cannot speak to where we can currently be of help, or where we want to go. This other person who has ‘communciation’ might be someone you want to get to know and learn from as that might be a focus for you next.
Like identifying a physical location, this skill triangulation allows you to assess your strengths, gaps, and how far you've come in your career journey.
Mapping your destination and your goal.
Career and personal development goals are like any milestone or destination. Triangulation helps clarify what success looks like for you by aligning your strengths with your aspirations.
This clarity makes it easier to chart a course toward your next role, industry, or opportunity. It also helps you begin to form a plan, build connections with fellow travelers, and be balanced in your approach toward the goal.
By analyzing your current skills against your goals and the demands of your desired field, you can identify the shortest or most strategic route to success. This might involve acquiring new skills, gaining certain experiences, or repositioning yourself.
It might involve meeting others with the same goals. It likely, depending on how long it takes to get to the goal, will require being able to pivot based on changes in the route.
Consider if you are wanting to go to school to study something or change your career entirely, that takes some time, and within that time some of the variables of the route might change like technology needs, understanding of certain processes or systems.
Iterative quick looks at your own position as you make your way toward your goal, and understanding the route ahead is essential. You wouldn’t jump in your car, look at your GPS once, turn it off, and drive across the United States from California to New York. You’d check your route, road closures, weather, supplies like food and fuel. You’d probably plan your schedule for driving, rather than go straight through.
This level of understanding your location helps to highlight the transferable skills and how they connect across industries and roles. For example, if you're transitioning from government work to the private sector, understanding how your public administration and policy coordination skills apply to your focus industries, new AI trends or remote work is crucial.
Without a clear understanding of your position, you might pursue opportunities that don’t align with your strengths or goals. Getting your current position down and your route planning prevents you from wasting time on detours that lead you away from your career aspirations. You still might have to take detours based on industry shifts or the economy, but they will be much better informed.
Knowing where you stand relative to your goals and industry trends allows you to make informed decisions about what to learn, whom to network with, and which roles to pursue. This helps you maximize impact and efficiency. Career planning and growth takes a lot of energy, and you want to use it wisely.
Some people absolutely live for career-constant approach, always networking, selling, etc. But that’s not required to make your career a success.
If you center in on what you want, where you are, and pay attention to your goal and route at intervals, you can enjoy the journey. You can meet people along the way and build true connections with them.
Planning is everything.
The career landscape shifts rapidly, especially with emerging fields like AI, with layoffs in companies popping up, and shifting industries and needs. None of us can tell the future, but we can prepare for what’s directly without our path and be ready to pivot.
I believe it was Eisenhower who said “Plans are worthless, planning is everything” or of more recent years in the words of Chumbawumba: ”I get knocked down. But I get up again. Ain’t never gonna get me down.”
Thinking of it like driving a car. You have a small rear view mirror to keep informed of what’s behind you, you have a huge windshield to keep you informed of what’s ahead. But you can’t drive the car well if you are planning only for what’s a few miles ahead, you have to pay attention to what you are about to drive over, around, or through.
The act of planning develops strategic capability and broad situational awareness, so that you can respond effectively when the plan invariably fails. Driving the car you are looking at a number of factors, quickly and constantly to balance out what needs to be done in the moment.
You might want to get over the mountains in your car before dark, but then you get stuck behind a truck. Making sure your headlights work as you cruise into town at dusk keeps you safe, able to keep moving, and able to pivot the plan. Planning for snags, hiccups, trends, and changes is better than locking into a plan thinking everything will go perfectly.
Triangulating your skills regularly ensures you’re always positioned to pivot effectively, leveraging both your existing capabilities and new opportunities. If you triangulate in small increments, much like driving a car and looking at the dashboard in quick glances, your journey will be much more enjoyable. If all you do is stare at the dashboard you might run off the road, but if you don’t take a glance every once in a while you can also overheat or run out of fuel.
Triangulating your skills and understanding your position is about orienting yourself in your career landscape with intention, so every step forward brings you closer to where you want to be.
You have to prove your position.
It’s not just about where you think you are at, but where others know you to be.
Any person can say all they want that they have a certain skill or bring a certain value, but truly without outside validation it’s pretty difficult to believe anyone.
The old ways of marketing screamed things like ‘we’re the best’ without any real backing. The old ways just told people where a product or service was at. Now, marketing of any sort really leans in on customer reviews. Think about Yelp, Uber Eats, Tripadvisor. So many people educate themselves on what something is before they buy, and they listen to where others say the product or service is at, not who is selling it.
Just saying you are somewhere without validation from others doesn’t magically put you in that place just because you say so. Now, sometimes faking it before you make it works, absolutely, but even the people faking it know they are faking it. They are using some sort of markers and ways of being that signify where they want to be. That’s a bit different than just saying ‘I’m great in product development’ when you’ve never managed a product before. You might have some skills that align with product development, sure, but there also might be some gaps.
How many people can navigate well in a place they don’t know without a map? Without GPS or some sort of indicator of where they are, a milestone? Before Google Maps, people would stop and ask for directions. I know, it’s a crazy thought but it did happen.
Validation of skills and where a person is at, much like what a GPS does to understand a location is really important. The way others talk about a skill or location might be drastically different, which can make it difficult, perhaps sometimes impossible, to center in on where you really are.
Let’s work through a scenario: You are amongst people that understand deeply a skill, let’s say user experience, and you have a background in physical space design and call yourself a user experience expert (UX) because it seems like the skills are similar.
Although there are some overlaps in balance and composition, there are technical knowledge and user behavior differences, not to mention the assumption of similarity may signal a lack of appreciation for the complexity and depth of UX design as a discipline.
This very well could lead to you scrambling to keep up with a conversation and tripping over yourself, and/or a loss of trust from the people around you. I’ve seen scenarios like this happen because someone was interested in something that seemed close, but it really wasn’t.
What seemingly might be a small issue can result in things like:
parts of a department (or a client) not trusting the people on a particular project because they positioned themselves as understanding a role, when they clearly didn’t.
confusion in direction to team members and vendors because industry standard language was not used, resulting in weeks of lost productivity
projects being cancelled or funds cut due to progress.
Skills can often be misunderstood out of pure excitement of being interested. But don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. Know what you carry into any conversation.
The more we know about how our skills we have can intersect into new learnings and skills, the more we can still be in those conversations, learn something, and not lose trust. It is totally ok to not know something, it’s normal. You don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, if you find yourself in that situation, go to another room.
You saying ‘I’m in the woods, next to the biggest tree’ might not be as useful as someone who knows the woods saying ‘they are in the northwest corner of the woods, near the largest oak tree, next to the stream’. You might say ‘I’m a project manager’, while others might say ‘she’s excellent at creative project management, but doesn’t have skill in construction projects’.
Consider if you want someone to validate your work on a project for a marketing campaign.
You supported the growth of a sales pipeline in this marketing campaign to bring $20 Million. You might say that you worked on marketing campaign management. Others might say that you enabled sales, used project management and communication to drive outcomes. There could be others who saw the campaign as a whole, and since you worked on it they might assume you worked on the entire thing, from content development, social media, project management, and tracking.
Being clear on what you bring to a room, what you’ve brought in the past, and what you’d like to bring in the future is one of the keys, if not the most vital, to growth, building trust and community, and success.
Having people who understand your position, who can validate it as you move along keeps you focused, able to pivot, building trust and community, and sets your foundational confidence for your path.