The Most Valuable Skill Set You Didn't Know You Had
I graduated with a liberal arts degree and absolutely zero understanding of how to frame my skill set.
At first, my skills felt like a useless, random, confusing tangle of vague concepts that failed to point me in a clear direction.
I could do a little bit of a variety of things, but nothing particularly well.
In a performance review, my supervisor called me a "generalist" and it hit me like an insult—like she was calling me a nobody.
I wondered: What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I discover my "thing"? Where did I belong?
I wished away my liberal arts degree and felt guilty for not making full use of it.
I wanted a real skill set that pointed me on a real path—skills that would tell me where to go and what next steps to take. Accounting! Law! Medicine!
I craved skills in the form of Specialized Expertise.
Sometimes they're called hard skills, technical skills, a specialization, or specialized content knowledge.
Specialized expertise seemed to me like the skills that really count—the ones that we can point to and clearly say: I can do or I know about this special thing. The skills valued by others.
"If I just found my special thing," I thought, "then everything would click into place."
Whether I became an expert in 20th century labor history or a software engineer for educational technology or an auditor of corporate accounting, I'd finally have a clear sense of direction.
I could put my flag in the ground and say: this is who I am as a professional.
But my skills don't lie in specialization. I can't pick just one thing. That's why I went to a liberal arts college in the first place! That's why I didn't want to limit myself to one track or role.
It took years for me to understand that, even as someone without specialized expertise, I did have a solid skill set that was marketable, transferable, and valuable—what I didn't have were the right tools to help me articulate and understand it.
The shift happened for me when I expanded my definition of skills to include not just Specialized Expertise but Process Expertise as well.
Process Expertise is knowing the steps that need to be taken in order to effectively complete a project. The project or content may change, but the steps remain the same.
Take event planning, for instance—whether it's a small dinner party or a large and lavish fundraiser, the same key questions apply: Who is invited and how will we invite them? How to set up the space? What are the goals of the event?
An event planner is an expert in the process of planning events.
I am an expert in the process of coaching.
Project management is process expertise. So is research, program planning, meeting facilitation, strategic planning, building a persuasive case, storytelling, synthesizing and presenting information, creating partnerships, and navigating cross-cultural teams...
Process expertise includes interpersonal skills that center on working with people—knowing how to facilitate collaboration, motivate others, and draw on their skills. Leadership is process expertise.
Sometimes these are called "soft" skills, but that label makes them sound mushy and unimportant when it's just the opposite: Process expertise comprises valuable and marketable skills that apply across jobs and industries. These are the skills that you can most easily take with you from job to job.
Process expertise are the key transferable skills that make you more adaptable to new work in a job economy built around rapid change.
Listen up, Liberal Arts majors and those of you who have gone on to do work that has nothing to do with your degrees:
Think through your skills in the categories of Specialized Expertise and Process Expertise. You'll have a lot more to work with than you expect.
Take it from an Education Studies major who married an East Asian Studies major—you have so many skills to bring to the table.
Don't discount the most valuable ones because they aren't specialized or technical. Own them like the marketable and transferable process skills that they are.
