Hi Nie!

A few weeks ago, I shared my strategy to avoid being pigeonholed in your career: ask and listen for opportunities to take on more responsibility and add value at your company. Then prioritize those opportunities to focus on the things that are most valuable to you at your current career stage.

Sometimes, you should pursue opportunities to gain a deeper level of experience with a skill you already have; other times, you should pursue opportunities that give you a broader skillset to draw on.

Then I shared insight from my friend Justin Jackson, who hires people to help him run Transistor, a podcast platform that he co-founded. Justin talked about positioning and how a job candidate's ability to clearly articulate what skills they'll use to add value to the team and how those skills will be valuable can help that candidate stand out from other candidates.

Today, we're going to dive deeper into positioning and talk specifically about how you can use skill stacking to take two relatively common skills and combine them into a unique skill that could be very valuable to potential employers.

Skill Stacking: When 2+2=5

The value in learning new skills is in combining them to do unique new things. For each new skill you add to your repertoire, you could gain multiple new skills that you didn't have before. So if you have two skills and you add two more skills, you may have more than four total skills now.

Why? Because that new skill might also augment your existing skills to create more new skills. So 2+2 might equal 5 or even more!

Let's call this Skill Stacking. I didn't invent this term, but I like it so I'm using it.

A Skill Stacking example

Let's say you're a video game character and you have two skills: walk and crouch. That's all you can do. These are great for when things are coming at you because you can jump over them or crouch under them. But that's about all they're good for and you're mobility is limited because you can't move quickly to avoid obstacles and baddies.

You learn two new skills—Run and Jump—and now you have four skills.

Ah ha! You no longer have to wait for things to come to you—you can go to them. You can explore and move around.

But here's where the magic of Skill Stacking comes in to play.

You can also combine your new skills of running and jumping with your two previous skills of walking and crouching. Because these four skills work so well together, you have gone from two to at least five skills by adding only one new skill to your repertoire. Here's what you can do now:

• Walk
• Crouch
• Run (new)
• Jump (new)
• BONUS: Jump across gaps by running and then jumping (new)
• BONUS: Slide under things by running and then crouching (new)

While you only added two new skills, you actually gained at least four new skills and there are probably even more to unlock.

Sometimes, a new skill is just one new skill. But most of the time, you can combine a new skill with other skills you already had to create even more skills.

Each of those new skills—the ones you explicitly add, and the ones you gain by combining existing skills—may be valuable in its own right. And the more valuable skills you have, the more opportunities you'll get and the more you can earn throughout your career.

A less abstract, real-world example

Let's say you're pretty good with Excel. You can use basic formulas, you're comfortable with data manipulation like filtering and sorting, and you can create simple charts and graphs to display the data. Maybe you use this for understanding some of your projects at work.

Then you learn PowerPoint. Nothing fancy, but you can put some text and bullets in your presentations, and add graphics like screenshots and pictures.

You have now learned two skills: Excel and PowerPoint. But you also have access to a third skill: Reporting.

You can create charts and graphs in Excel, then include them in a PowerPoint presentation, and create useful reports for your team or for management.

So by adding "knows PowerPoint" to your repertoire, you added one new basic skill, and Skill Stacking means you also added another valuable skill that can help you communicate with management and gain more visibility for the other work you do.

I started my career as an Engineer, and I later added an MBA to my skill stack. That was a very intentional decision—each of those skills is pretty valuable on its own, but an Engineer who also understands how to run a business is much more appealing to many employers in a world where pretty much every company is a tech company.

As it turned out, I was my actual future employer and I'm extremely grateful for my ability to context-switch between technical and business lines of thinking in my day-to-day work.

You can also stack skills you learn outside of work

You can also look for opportunities to add new skills outside of work that might pay off for your career as well. Reading books on new subjects or picking up new hobbies could net you new skills that you can stack with the skills you typically use at work.

Maybe that podcast idea you've been knocking around will give a chance to work with the Marketing department to edit their new podcast. Or maybe that little toy React app you've been building on the weekends could give you a chance to build a prototype for a new app your company wants to launch.

Look for new skills you can stack so you're ready when valuable new opportunities open up at work. Those opportunities will increase your earnings and add variety to your career.

All the best

Josh

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