How much of your profession have you actually seen?
One of the gaps I often find when working with people is an incomplete understanding of their own profession and all the possibilities that truly exist.
They know their current job really well and the work they’ve already done. They know the responsibilities they have been given and the kinds of projects they have worked on. They know what is expected of them within the context of the environments they’ve worked in. But that experience may represent only a portion of what someone in their profession could be doing.
It is easy to keep doing the same things because they are the things you have always done. That can happen to us individually, and it can happen inside businesses too. Over time, familiar work can start to look like the only work available.
I’m sure you’ve heard this many times throughout your career: “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”
When you are trying to turn your career into a craft, it helps to step back and ask: How complete is my picture of this profession?
I guide people through profession mapping inside my Career as Craft course. You can also begin the exercise yourself, right now.
What are the different areas of responsibility in your profession?
Start by writing down the different kinds of work that people with your title, or similar titles, are responsible for doing.
I call these focus areas or competencies. They are the categories of professional work.
In product marketing, for example, that might include buyer personas, product launches, messaging, sales enablement, and content creation. Those are a starting point, and the emphasis will differ from one role to another.
You can make your categories broad or specific, depending on your experience and what helps you understand the work. You might begin with “product launches” and later realize that you want to distinguish between different kinds of launches (like releases versus launches - and for those really sophisticated you’ll then realize the difference between launches and go-to-market).
For this first pass, write down the areas you already know. Include work you currently do, work you have done before, and work you know other people in your profession handle.
You are building a picture of the profession. Your own experience gives you a starting point, but it does not need to define the edges of the list.
In fact… it shouldn’t. We need to branch out beyond your current understanding (that’s the entire point of this!).
How can job descriptions help you find what you are missing?
Once you have written down what comes to mind, start looking beyond your own experience.
Search for your title and similar titles on a job board such as LinkedIn Jobs or Indeed. Look through the responsibilities, required experience, capabilities, and preferred qualifications.
What are employers asking people in this profession to do? What appears repeatedly? What do you see that you have never been asked to do in your own jobs?
I recommend looking through a range of descriptions…20, 30, 40, or even 50 or more… and continuing to add new areas to your list as you encounter them. You can do this across several sittings. The purpose is to see beyond the version of the profession you already know.
Add an area even if you have never done it.
At this stage, you are not deciding whether you qualify for a particular role. You are discovering what kinds of work exist within the field. Evaluating your skill, interest, and readiness comes later.
I’m always in awe when I sit down with someone, in a profession I’m not as familiar with, and we start digging into all of the things that are possible. It probably also helps that I don’t have a jaded or preconceived perspective and with my fresh inquisitive eyes, we get to explore all types of possibilities.
Believe me when I tell you, there’s always more than you realize.
You can also use AI to brainstorm competencies or responsibilities you may have missed. Treat the output as a starting list to investigate and compare with actual roles. Tailor it to what you find.
So when you feel you have your own profession well mapped out… we want to go just one step further.
What about work in adjacent professions?
After mapping the work central to your profession, consider the related work around it.
Think about the teams you have collaborated with on projects. What were they responsible for? What did they contribute that was outside your own role? What did they hand off to you? What did you give to them?
In product marketing, that might lead you toward brand awareness, paid advertising, search engine optimization, or design. I would usually map those as adjacent functions: product marketing may provide inputs to that work or use what those teams produce, while another team owns the responsibility.
Keep that distinction visible in your map. Something can be closely connected to your profession without being a core responsibility within it.
Because you may know less about those adjacent roles, use the same process again. Look at their job descriptions, ask people about the work, or use AI to help generate questions and areas to research.
There may come a time when you want to move into another profession. Work you have collaborated on can provide a more familiar starting point for exploration. You may already understand some of its problems, processes, and relationships, even if you would still have new skills to develop.
It’s also extremely common for jobs in one field to desperately want someone who has experience in an adjacent field because it solves something very specific to them (and they usually want to pay more for it, because it’s a rarity… like finding people in marketing who have engineering backgrounds, that can work on the community and evangelist teams.)
For now, you are simply giving yourself a fuller view of what sits nearby.
How do different companies change the work?
As you read job descriptions, pay attention to the setting as well as the responsibilities.
I call these the dimensions of your profession. They help explain why a responsibility might be central to one role and absent from another.
Some dimensions to notice include:
- Company size and stage, such as a startup or an established enterprise.
- Business-to-business work versus business-to-consumer work.
- Industries such as technology, healthcare, agriculture, or manufacturing.
- Commercial businesses, nonprofits, and government organizations.
- The audience served and the purpose of the organization.
- Different ways of working like frameworks, processes, or technology use.
We will explore these dimensions more deeply in another article. For this exercise, just start noticing how the work changes across them.
A familiar title may involve different responsibilities in a different setting. Similar responsibilities may also appear under a title you have not considered before.
That matters because changing the context of your work may open up possibilities you would miss if you searched only for your exact title in your current industry.
Could the same profession fit you better somewhere else?
One example I have explored with someone is the connection between environmental values and the setting in which they work.
Imagine that you care deeply about the environment, but your career has been in technology companies whose missions do not connect with that concern. You may be highly skilled at the work while still feeling that an important part of you has very little room in it.
What might your profession look like at a technology company focused on environmental problems? What might it look like in an environmental nonprofit outside the technology industry altogether?
What would it feel like to work at a company that shares the very values and principles you stand on and for?
You might discover familiar responsibilities being used toward a different purpose. You might also find that the work has a slightly different title or is described in language you do not normally use.
As you develop your craft, that can become useful information. You can begin to understand how to describe the experience you already have in language that connects with the work you want to move toward.
The aim is to recognize real connections between your experience and another setting, and to investigate what else you would need to learn.
What should you have at the end of this exercise?
You should have a broader map of three things: the work within your profession, the work adjacent to it, and the settings that shape how it is done.
You do not need to choose a new career direction yet. You do not need to rate everything, turn every unfamiliar area into a development goal, or finish the whole map in one sitting.
Keep adding to it as you discover more.
The question we are answering is simple: Does my understanding of my profession match the range of work that is actually out there?
In my conversations with people, the picture is often much less complete than they realized. And when your picture of what is possible is narrow, it can be discouraging. You can stay in a role because you believe there is nowhere else to go.
Before deciding that you have no other options, give yourself a chance to discover the ones you have not learned about yet.
