I thought I had five careers

Recently, I've begun to wonder whether I spent twenty years describing the evidence rather than the capability. 

For most of my career, I have answered the question "What do you do?" very literally.

If I organised the town hall, I said I organised the town hall.

If I scheduled the planning cycle, I said I scheduled the planning cycle.

If I built the SharePoint site, re-wrote the constitution or coordinated the project, those were the things I put on my résumé and the things I talked about in interviews. As far as I was concerned, I was simply describing the work.

Recently, I've begun to wonder whether I may have spent twenty years describing the evidence rather than the capability. If you've ever become indispensable in a role that was never designed to use your full capability, this may sound familiar. For years I have thought I’ve had a rather confusing career. Executive Assistant. Operations. Program support. Governance. Project coordination. Administration. None of those titles were wrong; I've genuinely done all of those jobs, or jobs that looked enough like them to be called those things. But I couldn’t explain why the work itself felt so familiar, despite the range of titles.

I would take a role that made sense on paper. Often it was the safe option; the role I knew I could do, the one that matched my previous experience and the one organisations knew how to hire. Then the pattern would step in. I'd learn the job. Then I'd learn the organisation. Somewhere along the way, I would start noticing things.

Why does nobody seem clear about who is making this decision? Why are three teams producing different versions of the same report? Why does important information live in six different places? Why does everybody appear busy while simultaneously being frustrated? Why does this process exist? Who owns this? Who is fixing that?

I suspect many people in support, operations, governance and coordination roles will recognise what happens next.

You notice a problem, then you assume somebody else must own it. You discover nobody owns it and eventually you either walk away or you quietly fix it yourself. Many of us have spent years doing exactly that without ever considering that identifying organisational problems might actually be the skill.

Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in me redesigning processes that weren't mine, improving reporting I didn't own, creating structures nobody requested or helping leaders solve problems that sat well outside my official role. Gradually, the work I was actually doing would become much larger than the position I had been hired to perform. People trusted me; leaders brought me problems and teams asked for help. While this was often rewarding because I was useful and often indispensable, eventually, I became frustrated.

For a long time I thought perhaps I was choosing the wrong jobs. Maybe I should have gone into strategy, or operations, or consulting, or project management. The truth was that I couldn't work out what I wanted to be because I couldn't work out what I already was.

Sitting in front of my résumé again, I found myself having the same frustrating thought I've had for years; on paper, I looked considerably more junior than much of the work I had actually done. It seems that some leaders understood this long before I did. Looking back, several of my best leaders hired me into one role and then very quickly started using me differently. The conversations moved away from diaries, meetings or administration and towards organisational problems. They would ask me “What are you seeing?” “Can you help me think this through?” “Something feels off here. Can you take a look at this? “

Those leaders weren't particularly interested in my job title. They were interested in whether I could help them understand what was happening inside the organisation. Other leaders saw exactly what my position description said. Neither was wrong, but the experience of the work was entirely different. One leader sees an Executive Assistant. Another sees somebody who can help improve decision-making. One sees administration and another sees organisational insight. I've also worked in environments where none of this happened. Not every organisation wants this capability, and crucially, not every organisation is ready for it. I cannot improve decision-making where decisions aren't being made. I cannot translate strategy that doesn't exist. I cannot create alignment if leaders don't actually want to be aligned. Some of my frustrations have come from assuming every organisation wanted the same things. They don't.

I suspect there are many people sitting inside organisations with exactly these experiences. Particularly women. Particularly people who began their careers in administrative, support or coordination roles. Particularly those who became known as reliable. The reward for being capable is often more work. The reward for being helpful is usually being seen as helpful. Not strategic. Not insightful. Not organisationally valuable. Helpful.

I wonder if many of us become extraordinarily good at describing the visible tasks while completely underselling the value underneath them. We say we organised the meeting, while the executive remembers that the meeting finally became useful. We say we built the site, while the organisation remembers that people could finally find information. We say we coordinated the project, while the team remembers that somebody finally connected all the moving parts. Both descriptions are true, but they are not describing the same thing.

This realisation has been particularly uncomfortable for me because I am an extremely literal person. If I organised the town hall, then I genuinely believed the important fact was that I organised the town hall. I wasn't trying to be modest. I wasn't deliberately underselling myself. I simply believed that the work was the work. Meanwhile, other people were often experiencing something entirely different.

Years ago, a friend once told me that I always needed to be right. I remember trying to explain that it didn't feel like that from the inside. It wasn't about being right so much as wanting things to be accurate. The distinction mattered to me, even if it sounded pedantic. In hindsight, I wonder if that instinct has shaped much of my career. I seem to spend a lot of time questioning whether we're describing the right problem, using the right language or solving the thing that's really broken. Often I think that can probably feel uncomfortable. But honestly, it sits at the heart of the work I do.

After weeks of trying to explain myself to recruiters, hiring managers and, if I'm honest, to myself, I found myself staring at yet another version of my résumé. On paper, it still looked like a collection of unrelated jobs. Executive effectiveness. Governance. Operations. Project coordination. The individual roles made sense, but the overall story didn't. I remember looking at the page and thinking that either I had spent twenty years wandering between different careers, or I was missing something obvious.

Then I wrote a sentence that stopped me. I improve organisational decision-making.

I remember staring at the sentence for several minutes because my immediate reaction was, "Well, that's annoyingly accurate." It explained more of my career than any job title ever had.

I improve organisational decision-making not because I sit at the top of organisations and certainly not because I have formal authority. I do it by making things visible, helping people understand systems, and translating ideas into something people can act on. Visibility comes first. When you ask the question that nobody has asked because everyone assumes somebody else already has, people can see what's really happening and decisions improve naturally. Information starts flowing to the right places, friction becomes easier to identify, and teams stop spending energy arguing about symptoms because they can finally see the underlying problem.

I honestly don't think this capability is particularly rare. I think we simply don't have very good language for it. Organisations tend to understand specialists, managers and executives. They understand clearly defined functions and neatly described responsibilities. They are often less certain about the people who work between strategy and execution; the people who connect information, identify patterns, reduce friction and quietly improve the quality of decisions.

Some leaders recognise these people immediately. Others accidentally hire them as administrators and become uncomfortable when they begin operating beyond the role. The people themselves often struggle to explain what they do because the visible work appears too small to describe the contribution. Perhaps that is why so many capable people spend years feeling strangely miscast. Personally, I no longer think I've spent twenty years moving between unrelated jobs. I think I've spent twenty years repeating the same patterns under different titles. Finding language for that has been unexpectedly emotional, partly because it explains why I have often felt underestimated. It also explains why my CV has frequently read more junior than the work I was actually doing. Not only did organisations underestimate me, I also underestimated myself.

After years of trying to decide what I wanted to be, I've finally started to understand what I already am. The hardest part of that realisation is recognising that the evidence was there all along; I just didn't know how to read it.