When you change worlds, what actually comes with you?

15 years in MedTech and SaaS. Commercial teams across 18 countries. Revenue managed up to 200+ million. That was my case for being taken seriously.

Then I started having conversations in the founder and investor world, and I noticed something. Almost none of that, stated the way I'd always stated it, meant anything to the people in front of me...

When you move into a new world, your experience splits into two buckets. You just can't see the line between them until you dive in.

The first bucket is everything tied to where you were. The industry knowledge. The company name on your CV. The relationships inside that business. The specific playbook that worked in that specific place. It's most of what your CV is made of, and most of what you're proud of.

The second bucket is the capability underneath it all. How you think. How you size up a market. How you make decisions with half the information you'd like. How you build something from a small base. This is harder to describe, and almost invisible, because for years you practiced it as part of your day to day and never really had to talk about it.

What’s improtant to recognise is that the first bucket stays behind but it’s the second one that travels with you. Sounds obvious right?

Most senior people lead with the first bucket. It's the obvious move, and it's the wrong one.

The reason is simple. It feels like proof. It's concrete. A known company name does some of the work for you. A revenue number sounds like an achievement. 20 years in an industry sounds like authority. So when you walk into a new room, that's what you reach for.

But in a room that doesn't know your old world nor the big logos you worked for, none of it carries the way it used to. The company name means nothing here. The industry context doesn't apply. The relationships don't resonate. You're holding up the proof that worked everywhere you've already been, in the one place it doesn't.

And the capability that would actually travel, the judgment and the operating instinct, stays buried, because you've never had to put it into words. It was just how things got done.

So the work to do, before you change worlds, is to deliberatly separate the two.

Take each thing you're proud of. Strip out the company, the industry, and the era, and ask what's left. What is the actual capability underneath this achievement, stated so that someone in a completely different field would understand why it's hard and why it matters?

'I scaled revenue teams internationally for years and managed upwards of 200M ARR travels. 'I was a commercial leader at a MedTech company' does not. Same career. One is a capability. The other is a location.

That is the difference between what you did and what you can do. The first is a history. The second is portable, and it's the thing a new world is actually buying. I’m using a simple example but you get the gist.

Here's why I'm telling you this in a career newsletter.

Working out what genuinely transfers, and learning to say it in language a new field recognises, is some of the hardest and highest-value work in any career transition. Most people skip it and send the same CV into a world that can't read it. It's a core part of what I'm building Zelova to help you with, as a career strategy service rather than a job board. The product is still being finalised, but you can sign up for early access at zelova.ai to follow along.

A question to reflect on this week.

If you couldn't mention your last company or your industry, could you still explain why you're good at what you do? If that's hard, it isn't for lack of a good answer. The answer has just not been worked on properly yet.

So here's the exercise. Take your 3 biggest achievements. Rewrite each one with no company name and no industry, just the capability underneath. What you're left with is your real, portable value. It's almost always stronger than any version of your CV.

I built the Repositioning Framework for exactly this. It walks you through separating what you did from what you can do, and rebuilding your value around the part that transfers. You can find it here and download it for free.

That's the work that turns a career history into a career you can take anywhere.

You can email or message me directly. I'd like to hear your version, especially the achievement that looked completely different once you stripped the company name off it and perhaps how easy / difficult you found this excercise.

Have fun with it.