A few weeks ago, I asked “What are you known for?” The response surprised me. People reached out, shared the article, sent notes, and started conversations about their own careers. The more I thought about those conversations, the more I realized another question sat right behind the first: What do you take with you?
Knowing what you are known for is one thing. Understanding the value of everything you have accumulated along the way is something else entirely, and that becomes especially important for anyone who suddenly finds themselves between jobs.
When you have spent 10, 20 or 30 years building a career, losing a position can make it feel as though someone just erased a huge part of what you built. Yesterday you had a title, an email address, a company behind your name and a place where you were expected to show up every morning. Today, maybe you don’t. But here is what I think we sometimes forget: the job stayed with the company. Your career didn’t.
There is a difference.
You still have every relationship you’ve built, every client conversation that taught you something, every impossible problem you figured out, every presentation you gave, every mistake you made, every lesson you learned and every person who learned they could count on you. None of that belonged to your employer. It belongs to you.
I’ve spent more than 24 years in Radio and National Media Sales, and for a long time I probably would have described my career pretty simply: I sell Radio. But somewhere along the way, my career became a lot more than that.
Working with advertisers taught me about retail. Mapping taught me to look at geography differently. Agriculture introduced me to an entirely different world of marketers and consumers. Building a business forced me to understand branding, product development, and entrepreneurship. Writing pushed me to organize my thoughts and develop a point of view. Working in animal health introduced me to an entirely different industry.
Today, I’m back working inside a major media company, but I didn’t leave those other pieces at the door when I walked in. I brought them with me, and that may be one of the biggest opportunities people miss when they start looking for their next job.
We tend to search backward. What companies are hiring for the job I used to have? What title matches the title I just lost? Who needs someone who has done exactly what I have been doing? Those are perfectly reasonable questions, but they shouldn’t be the only questions.
Maybe you spent 15 years in radio sales, but what you actually became really good at was understanding local businesses. Maybe you spent 20 years programming a station, but along the way you became exceptional at building communities, developing talent and understanding what makes people pay attention. Maybe you worked in traffic, promotions, research, engineering, digital, management or affiliate relations. Your title describes the department you worked in. It doesn’t necessarily describe everything you learned while you were there.
That distinction matters because sometimes we make experience smaller by trying too hard to package it neatly. We say, “I’m a radio person.” Yes, you are. But what else are you? What problems do people call you to solve? What have you learned that would be valuable in an industry that isn’t Radio? What relationships have you developed? What parts of your job always seemed to come naturally to you? What did people ask you for help with even when it technically wasn’t your responsibility?
Those answers may tell you far more about where you can go next than your old job description ever will.
Your next chapter also doesn’t necessarily have to look like the chapter before it. I think that can be difficult to accept, particularly when you have built a career in an industry you genuinely love. Radio becomes part of your identity. The relationships run deep. People move from company to company, market to market, and job to job, but somehow, we all continue bumping into each other. There is a familiarity to this business that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t lived in it.
So when someone suddenly finds themselves outside of it, even temporarily, I understand why the instinct is to get back inside as quickly as possible. Maybe that is exactly where you belong. But maybe your experience also qualifies you for opportunities you haven’t considered yet. That isn’t abandoning your career. That is using it.
There is another piece of this that I think deserves to be said. You don’t have to reinvent yourself every time your circumstances change.
I hear that word a lot: reinvent. I understand what people mean by it, but I don’t think most experienced professionals need to completely reinvent themselves. You aren’t starting over. You are building from what is already there.
Maybe you add a skill. Maybe you enter a different industry. Maybe you finally explore an idea you’ve been sitting on for years. Maybe you consult, write, start something new, or take everything you learned in one part of the business and apply it somewhere nobody expected.
That isn’t reinvention. That is evolution.
And there is a big difference between the two. Starting over sounds like everything before this point no longer counts. Evolution recognizes that everything before this point is exactly what made the next step possible.
If you happen to be sitting at one of those career crossroads right now, I hope you don’t measure your value by how long it takes someone else to give you another title. Look at what you already built. Call the people you have helped over the years. Reconnect with the relationships that mattered. Pay attention to what people consistently tell you that you are good at and look at the pieces of your career that followed you from company to company even when your responsibilities changed.
And don’t be afraid if those pieces don’t all fit neatly into one box. Mine certainly don’t. Maybe yours aren’t supposed to either.
A company can eliminate your position, change your territory, restructure your department, merge with another company, or decide to move in a completely different direction. What it cannot take is the experience you earned while you were there. It cannot take the relationships, the reputation, the knowledge, or what you decide to build with all of it next.
So maybe after asking yourself, What am I known for? there is one more question worth asking:
What am I taking with me?
I guess that when you really stop and look at it, the answer is a whole lot more than you thought.
