No one had done the job before Including me.

In 2020 I started a career I was not expecting to start, and what I wrote at the time was that it left me with a lot of questions. That is a mild way to put it. What I meant was that I did not know what the job was.

Three years later I did it again, except harder, because this time the role had not previously existed. There was no predecessor to ask. Nobody in the building had done it.

Including me.

What I actually did, both times

Not “I researched the field.” Here is the real list, because the real list is less impressive and more useful: online courses, blog posts, videos, and asking one colleague a lot of questions. His name is Clay, and I suspect he has no idea how much of my first year was reverse-engineered out of his patience.

The second time I found a training program run by one of the leading agencies in the field and worked through it until I had the certification, which I finished that November. It gave me tools and vocabulary, and the vocabulary mattered more than it sounds like it should. A lot of entering cold is not knowing what things are called. Not knowing what things are called means you cannot search for them, which means you cannot teach yourself.

But the certificate is not the part worth telling you about.

The part worth telling you about

I brought the team into the coursework while I was still doing it.

Not afterwards, as a rollout. During. They were learning what I was learning in real time, which meant that when the new methods turned up in our actual work, they were not something I had gone away and come back with. What I wrote at the time was that this was huge for getting buy-in, and for them wanting to use the methods, without it being something that was placed upon them.

I would like to claim I planned that. I did not. I did it because I was learning too slowly to build a curriculum and deliver it later, and the fastest available path was to do it out loud.

The accidental version turned out to be the better one, which I have thought about a lot since. If I had disappeared for three months and returned with a methodology, I would have returned as the person who owned the methodology. Doing it in the open meant nobody had to be converted, because nobody had missed anything.

What transfers, and what does not

The thing I keep expecting to transfer is domain knowledge, and it never does. Marketing did not teach me data. Data did not teach me brand. Each time, the actual content was new.

What transferred was smaller and duller and far more portable. Knowing how to find the vocabulary. Knowing that the first six weeks feel like drowning and that this is not information about your ability. Knowing which questions make a colleague glad to help and which ones quietly hand them your job. Knowing what a real answer looks like next to a confident one.

None of that goes on a CV, right? There is no line item for having been the least qualified person in the room five times and knowing exactly what that feels like in week three.

The thing I still have not solved

I wrote something else at the end of that second year, after two paragraphs describing what had gone well, and it is the truest sentence in the document. The challenge I kept facing was not feeling like I was adding the appropriate amount of value consistently. I had seen the role add value in spurts. It was going to take time to reveal its true value.

That was written about a job I was doing well.

Entering cold does not only mean you lack the skills. It means you lack the evidence. You cannot point at a track record, because you do not have one yet, and the work that would build the track record is the same work you are currently being asked to justify.

I do not have a fix. I have only noticed that it outlasts the skill gap by a long way. The skills arrive in about a year. The sense that you have not yet proved anything stays a great deal longer.

Which leaves the question I still cannot answer. How would I tell the difference between not having proved it yet, and it not being true?