What makes you weird? It's probably your most marketable skill

Do you know what makes you different?
Awesome werid pretty blue hair girl.jpeg

In my life as a designer, I was so close to getting lost in the masses. I was working as a Civil-Structural-Architectural Designer in Oil and Gas. Sound like a niche? It wasn't. I was in a department of many, many others like me, and there were so many Engineering companies out there (I contracted to many of them!) It was a time when my job was well defined, but it was hard to move up, when so many others did what i did. Many of them had years and years of experience on me too.

So when things get dicey, the people on the bottom tend to fall off the ladder. Oil and Gas is a volatile industry to say the least, and there were many mini boom-busts in between the big swings. What does this teach you? To use how you're different to make you better at whatever you do.

I wasn't quite like everyone else in the group, I'd studied architecture, not purely Civil/Structural like the rest of the group. I only had a couple of years of working experience at the time, I was 23 and just out of school. My head was full of so much knowledge (or so it felt!) but it seemed like so little of it applied. I felt like I was at a disadvantage. I had to set out to be as useful as possible. That sometimes meant taking on the workloads of others, and working extra hours. I felt like I needed to catch up. Trying to do whatever work I could to be helpful to my peers gave me an opportunity to learn from these more experienced people.

Then something new came through our group. In the early 2000's this department had yet to work on a 3D project. (Now, pretty much all engineering design work is in 3D.) Lucky for me, that was the way I was most comfortable working. It was how we designed in school. Suddenly I had a skillset I could share with others. Now, on this new project I could take a greater role, I was in a position where being different was an advantage. I returned the favor to those who wanted to work with me prior, and then it was me who was able to do the teaching.

Suddenly, I was the only person in our small department who had worked in this particular program before, and help and training were slow to come. I took this opportunity seriously and began to put together some notes for everyone. Simple screenshots of the basic commands and presented them to my peers. Maybe it was overkill, but at least of few found it helpful.

What ended up happening was that I got the attention of the applications group, a short staffed group of tech saavy former designers who served these groups who were understaffed and overwhelmed. Within a few months I was part of a growing department with a new job title and salary bump.

What's cool about looking back at that time almost 15 years ago, is seeing how which actions and attitudes lead to the best results.

No matter your own skills, circumstances and environment, you are where you are, and you can only begin to make moves and changes from there.

It was only 3 key steps that lead to this growth and promotion that would set me on my path to my first big raise and promotion.

Service.
When I was unsure of my place, I sought to be as helpful to others as possible. In times of uncertainty, seek to create positivity and you'll almost always find your ground while making friends and allies along the way. If this is where you're comfortable, you can stay here. There aren't enough supporter-type people in the world, everyone could use a really effective support team to succeed.
Diversity.
Know what makes you different. When you have been seeking to be helpful, you will find out what people find the MOST helpful. Do more of that. That's a gap and someone will need to fill it. You'll find the problems that you can solve better than others soon enough.
Stack your skills.
It's tempting to label yourself as one thing, a designer, for example, but if you add teacher to that, now you're unique. What resulted from the simple screenshots and notes that I made, was years of training, on the job and through courses, how to be a professional trainer.

To this day, training is one of my favorite ways to help others and make a living. Creating courses and sharing knowledge now more than ever is a valuable skill. But without other areas of knowledge, there's not so much to teach! When you have a particular area of expertise, learn the skills that others arent mastering, to solve a problem that's going under served.

If you think about what you do in general terms, then you may only amount to general things. These days, I'm still considering learning some basic programming skills, not because I want to be a programmer, but because it's a great skill to add to the collection I'm growing. As many of you appreciate, understanding programming will only support nearly any endeavor you can think of on the internet.

So where are your skills? I know that many of you who've reached out to me so far are designers and artists. What kind of art? What's your style? What makes you weird? Whatever that is, the thing that no one else is really doing, is what will make you far more money than being like the rest.