When the Problem Isn't What You're Missing...It's What You're Not Seeing
We'd just defined Sara Turner, the technically brilliant but strategically invisible data professional Tereza served. Clear persona. Clear problem.
But understanding who you serve is different from understanding what they actually need.
During the first brand promise workshop, as we discussed what made her clients struggle with career transitions, Tereza said something that would become the foundation of her entire methodology.
The Question: What Does Sara Actually Need?
We were discussing the challenges her clients faced when trying to transition roles. The pattern she kept seeing: people learning new skills but still struggling to make career moves.
As we explored why this kept happening, the deeper insight emerged.
The Core Insight: Skills vs. Experience
Tereza: "I think the issue today is that a lot of people are learning stuff without actually having experience. Then when they want to apply and do something, they're feeling they can't really sell it."
Tereza: "But on the other side, when people are learning, they're learning skills, but skills is not necessarily experience."
This distinction would become central to her methodology.
Skills = what you learn in courses, certifications, bootcamps
Experience = what you've actually done in real work situations with real stakes
People were collecting skills but missing the experience they already had.
The Methodology Principle: Finding Value That's Already There
This wasn't just a semantic distinction. This was revealing the core principle of how Tereza worked with clients.
Tereza: "It's about finding the value that is already there, versus investing so much in acquiring new things."
Izumi: "Yes. It's really translating what you've done and understanding what that actually means."
Tereza: "Yeah, with respect to whatever you want to do. In the end, you have to translate your experience to whatever direction you're heading. And this is actually a skill to learn—how do you unpack a two-year project? What did you actually do day-to-day? Those are the details that become your experience. You can't just say 'I worked on this project.' You have to unpack what you actually did."
This was the Data Diplomat discovery repeating at a deeper level:
Chapter 2 excavation: The Data Diplomat framework was already there in Tereza's language
Chapter 3 excavation: The core persona was already there in her work
Chapter 4 excavation: The career value clients seek is already there in their experience
The pattern: Recognition over addition.
The Market Reality: Why This Matters Now
This insight wasn't just philosophically elegant. It was strategically essential for the current market reality.
Tereza shared a concrete example:
Tereza: "Someone told me they needed to learn finance skills—P&L, budgeting—so they were planning to take a course.
I asked them: 'Would you hire someone who learned about doing P&L in a course, or someone who has actually done P&L?'
They admitted they'd hire the one with experience.
So the question becomes: how do you get real experience—not portfolio-level experience like 'I played around with it'—but actual on-the-job experience where you've noticed the effect and impact and learned real lessons?"
This crystallized the problem with the traditional career development approach:
The old model (no longer works):
-
- Identify skill gap
- Take course/certification/bootcamp
- Add to resume
- Apply for roles requiring that skill
Why it's broken:
-
- AI has disrupted what "learning a skill" means
- Employers don't trust portfolio projects anymore
- The market is flooded with people who "learned" the same skills
- Hiring managers want proven experience: "I did this in a real job, with real stakeholders, with measurable results"
Tereza's approach:
-
- Recognize experience you already have
- Translate it into strategic positioning
- Build credibility through "in-place learning"
- Gain experience within current role before making career moves
In-Place Learning: The Solution
Tereza: "The more I talk about it, the more I agree with myself on this idea: figure out how to create small experiments where you can get in-place job experience. Nobody feels safe quitting their job now. Unless you're at a certain age with confidence that you can go back to whatever you want, or you don't have family obligations—but a lot of people can't take that risk."
This became central to her framework: Transform your current role into a laboratory for building the experience you need.
Example: A scrum master wanted to transition into data science.
Instead of:
- Quitting to do a bootcamp
- Building portfolio projects
- Applying for junior data roles
He:
- Integrated data collection into his current scrum master role
- Built models to estimate story points
- Demonstrated impact within his team
- Gained internal sponsorship
- Built credible story with real results
Same outcome (data science capability). But with income stability, internal credibility, and actual business impact to talk about.
The Non-Quantifiable Skills Insight
This led to another crucial discovery about what actually drives career advancement.
Tereza: "We tend to think that when we want to do a role transition, what we need to improve are the quantifiable skills. But we often get judged on the non-quantifiable skills. So acquiring more skills that you can't actually use is wasted effort."
This distinction became fundamental:
Quantifiable skills: Python, SQL, machine learning, data visualization
Non-quantifiable skills: Stakeholder management, influence without authority, strategic framing, diplomatic communication
The paradox:
- People focus on acquiring quantifiable skills
- But career advancement depends on non-quantifiable skills
- And people already have experience with non-quantifiable skills—they just don't recognize it as valuable
Sara Turner's real problem:
Not: "I don't know how to build ML models" (she does)
But: "I don't know how to position my work so management sees strategic value"
She doesn't need more technical skills.
She needs to:
-
- Recognize the diplomatic experience she already has
- Translate technical work into business value language
- Position herself as strategically valuable, not just technically competent
Is your coaching framework hiding in plain sight too?
A Quick Self-Check to See if Your Coaching Method Already Contains a Hidden Framework
Why This Methodology Approach Matters
This insight reveals Tereza's distinct approach as a methodology:
Deficit-based thinking:
- "Identify your skill gaps"
- "Upskill to stay competitive"
- "Get more certifications"
- "Build your portfolio"
Excavation-based thinking (Tereza's approach):
- "Recognize the experience you already have"
- "Translate your existing work into strategic positioning"
- "Build credibility through in-place learning"
- "Focus on non-quantifiable diplomatic skills"
The methodological difference:
A deficit approach operates from: What are you missing? What do you need to add?
An excavation approach operates from: What do you already have that you're not seeing? How do we translate it into strategic value?
Just like Tereza lived as a Data Diplomat herself ...translating between technical and business worlds... her coaching methodology is fundamentally about translation, not addition.
What Happened Next
With this methodology principle clear, we could finally understand what made Tereza's approach unique.
But there was still one more piece missing: How she delivered this insight.
Because it's one thing to have a methodology. It's another thing to have a distinct way of showing up that clients recognize and value.
And that differentiator wasn't hiding in her program structure or marketing positioning.
It was clearly visible in what her clients already said about her, if we knew where to look.
The Excavation Principle:
Your methodology isn't about helping clients acquire what they're missing. It's about helping them recognize and translate what they already have. Skills can be learned in courses. Experience comes from actually doing the work. And most people have far more valuable experience than they realize. It just needs to be excavated and positioned.
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- Chapter 1: When Success Does Not Equal Clarity
- Chapter 2: The “Data Diplomat” Moment
- Chapter 3: The Persona Discovery
- Chapter 4: The Experience Vs. Skills Discovery <<<YOU ARE HERE
- Chapter 5: The Brutal Honesty Differentiator
- Chapter 6: Brand Promise - The North Star that guides everything
- Chapter 7: Mapping the Journey
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