You know you need to make a move – maybe you’re ready to push for that next level, it’s no longer tenable to stay where you are, or you’ve become aware of a new opportunity.
You sit down to update your CV or LinkedIn, ready to capture the value you’ve built over the past however many years, and you realise you’re not quite sure how to articulate what makes you distinctively valuable. You can list your roles, your projects, your core skills, but when it comes to explaining what makes your approach different, what you’re specifically known for, why someone should back you for the next level – the words don’t flow as easily as you’d like.
Or perhaps the CV is done, and on paper, the story makes sense but it’s when you’re asked to talk about it – in an interview, a promotion conversation, or an informal discussion with a senior sponsor – that things feel less solid. Saying it out loud, in real time, suddenly feels harder than writing it down.
Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve had to do this. You’ve probably been busy delivering, building your career, and you might have stayed in the same company or sector. Now you need to translate all that experience into something clear and compelling, and it feels harder than it should.
Why this gets more difficult as you get more senior
At this stage of your career, it’s not about listing skills anymore but it’s much more about translating embedded patterns of impact into value-based language that lands with someone who doesn’t already know you.
The things that likely got you promoted to where you are – technical depth, reliable delivery, being a trusted pair of hands – aren’t necessarily what positions you for the next level, where it’s not just about what you can do but also about how you do it, the value that creates, and what becomes possible when you’re in the room.
When you’ve been somewhere for years, you’ve often stopped noticing the things that make you distinctively valuable. They’ve become so embedded in how you operate that they just feel normal. Until someone asks you to explain them, and suddenly you’re not quite sure where to start.
An example:
I worked with someone recently who was facing exactly this. She was a senior manager, who had spent 15 years at the same organisation. She had strong performance ratings, and was being approached for director-level roles externally. On paper she had everything, but when we started talking about how she’d position herself, she struggled.
“I’m good with stakeholders” was one of her named strengths. This is fine as a starting point, but not enough to differentiate her from hundreds of other senior managers who could say exactly the same thing.
As we worked through her career journey, something more interesting emerged. Her real strength wasn’t stakeholder management in general, but her ability to translate highly technical complexity into strategic business cases and communicate these in language that non-technical executives could actually understand and act on. She’d done it repeatedly, across different contexts, and it had directly led to significant projects getting approval that might otherwise have stalled. But to her, that just felt like part of the job. Surely everyone did this?
They didn’t, and once she could see that pattern more clearly, along with a few others, and describe them well with specific examples, her entire positioning shifted. She could explain how she bridged technical and business worlds and how that created tangible impact for her clients and her organisation. She could then extrapolate to make a clearer case for the value this would bring to her next role.
The conversations that followed – both internal and external – became markedly different. Not because she’d suddenly developed new skills, but because she was better able and much more confident to explain the value she’d been creating all along.
What it costs when you can’t articulate this
When you’re not clear on your distinctive value, a few things tend to happen. You undersell yourself in crucial conversations, positioning yourself as competent rather than uniquely suited. You struggle to evaluate whether opportunities genuinely play to your strengths or just look good on paper. Perhaps most importantly at senior levels, you make it harder for others to advocate for you – because if you can’t articulate your value clearly enough, they can’t either.
In environments where decisions are made in rooms you’re not always in, that lack of clarity can quietly limit momentum, even for strong performers, because others end up filling in the gaps themselves. It’s often not that you lack ability to do the work, but that you lack the language to fully position yourself effectively for what comes next.
Understanding your career themes
This is where identifying your career themes becomes genuinely useful – not as a branding exercise or something for your LinkedIn headline, but as a structured way to understand and evidence the consistent patterns of value you create.
Your themes aren’t just a list of skills, they’re the distinctive ways you approach problems, build relationships, and drive outcomes. They’re what colleagues consistently seek your help with, the common threads in your best work, and what makes you valuable in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious from your job title.
When you can identify these themes clearly, back them up with concrete examples, and articulate the value they create, several things tend to shift. Career conversations become more focused, interviews feel more natural, and you can evaluate opportunities more strategically – not just “can I do this?” but “does this role genuinely play to what I’m best at?”
What becomes possible
This isn’t about becoming someone different or suddenly developing new capabilities. It’s about having the language to describe the value you’ve probably been creating for years.
When you can do that, positioning yourself for the next opportunity stops feeling awkward and starts feeling straightforward – not because you’re more qualified than you were before, but because you can clearly explain why you’re the right person for what comes next.
If you’re finding it difficult to articulate your unique value as you look ahead to your next move – or simply want to sense-check how you’re positioning yourself – that’s something I help with regularly. You’re welcome to book a call or just send me a message.