3 Frameworks to Go From Overlooked Employee to the Person Everyone in the Office Remembers
How stacking the right skills, shifting perception, and positioning yourself correctly can fast-track your career without the politics.
Most people think career advancement is about working harder or putting in more hours.
That is half-true. What’s more true is that you need to pair ‘hard work’ with the skill to get your hard work noticed. This does not mean begging for validation from colleagues and leaders.
It means: doing remarkable things that are just too hard to ignore.
How do you do that?
Using these three frameworks:
How you combine your skills (not just what you know)
How visible your value is to others (not just how much you deliver)
How you position yourself in the organization (not just where you sit).
They turn invisible employees into office heroes—regardless of the corporate politics.
Framework #1: Find your unique skill combo
Here’s the reality: having just one skill does not help you stand out.
Everyone at work is good at doing the set of daily tasks they’ve been doing every day since they started the role. Being good at those (while it keeps your job secure) is obviously not enough to make you noticeable.
It’s simply what you (and everyone else with the same job title) were hired to do.
Instead of doing what everybody else is doing, figure out a way to do other tasks that go beyond the normal day-to-day stuff. Why?
It makes you different. Being ‘different’ is noticeable. And the best and simplest way to make yourself noticeable is to stack complementary skills that multiply their value.
Here’s what I mean…
If you’re a Mechanical Engineering Technologist, you’re competing with every other technologist in your company. But if you’re a technologist who also knows:
Excel automation (to increase productivity);
Applies copywriting principles to emails (to grab the attention of busy colleagues, leaders or subject matter experts);
How to listen with intent (to get the other person to spill as much info as possible).
You’ve just put yourself in a category of one…because no one else has the exact set of skills.
That’s the approach I’ve taken to go from ‘just like anybody’ to becoming a lead in his department.
Now, I need to point out that I’m not special. None of the skills I mentioned is “special”. Therefore, if I can pull that off, so can you.
Truth is, I just learned how to apply the skills I learned outside of work into my role.
If you’re wondering right now which skills you already have and should get better at (and that are also stackable), here are some ideas:
