Invest in the Baseline Before You Invest in the Extra

On my team right now, there is a colleague who has known Power BI for years. That skill sat mostly unused for a long stretch, until they found a way to apply it to a handful of specific clients, and once that happened, people started asking for them by name and pulling them into projects other people on the team never see. I have a different colleague who codes, and they get flagged the same way whenever a project needs something custom built. When I was coming up in this industry, I watched the same pattern happen with other people who had a niche skill that happened to line up with something the firm needed.

At the time, I expected the lesson to be that a valuable skill goes to waste if an employer does not use it well. What I actually learned was that the skill becomes the thing people notice about you the moment the firm has a use for it, and until that moment arrives, it earns you nothing no matter how good you are at it.

I have said for years that no employer is going to pay you extra because you speak Spanish, unless that language actually matters to how they do business. I stand by that, and I think it applies to a long list of skills people assume will set them apart. A skill only has value to an employer once the employer is in a position to capitalize on it. Until then, it is just something you happen to be good at.

I teach an adjunct course at night, and my full time employer does not pay me more or think more of me because of it. That skill set has no home in my primary job. It has a home somewhere else, and I have had to build that somewhere else myself. That is not a complaint. Not every skill is meant to be monetized, and not every skill you do monetize will be monetized by the same employer who benefits from your day job.

On a team like mine, there is a baseline layer everyone needs to clear. You need to be capable in at least one of a handful of core areas, transaction advisory, technical accounting, controllership, or financial planning and analysis, before you are useful enough to put in front of a client. But baseline is not a fixed list, it depends on the seat you are sitting in. Communication is baseline for everyone, no matter what you do. Business development is not baseline for a first year associate, but it becomes baseline once your role actually requires you to bring in work, and at that point it belongs on the same list as technical accounting or controllership, not off to the side as something extra. The real dividing line is not hard skill against soft skill. It is whether the skill is required to do the job you have right now, or whether it is something extra you are layering on top of that job.

The baseline layer is the part people underrate. Firms do not hire someone who only knows how to code and hope that person eventually learns technical accounting well enough to automate it correctly. They get lucky if they hire someone who already knows the job and happens to also know how to code. The coding does nothing on its own. It only becomes useful once it is attached to someone who understands what the numbers are supposed to look like in the first place.

I see this same thing in students and early career professionals, and it does not always show up on the resume itself. It shows up in the attitude first. Someone will list five different pieces of software they have touched for an hour or two each, Python, Power BI, some modeling tool, and treat that list as evidence of value. An hour or two with a tool does not mean you can actually do anything with it. I would rather see someone who has put a hundred hours into one thing than someone who has put five hours each into twenty things. Wanting to be good at something and being good at it are not the same, and a resume built on half finished extracurricular skills tells me the person has not figured out the difference yet. If you cannot do the underlying work without the tool, the tool is not going to save you.

If I ask someone on my team to prepare a financial statement, I care whether the financial statement is right. Someone might build a clever process to pull in a trial balance and update everything automatically, and that is a real skill worth having eventually. But if that same person puts accounts in the wrong place because they do not actually understand what belongs where, I would rather have the person who does it a little more slowly by hand and gets it right. A fast, automated answer to the wrong question is not a shortcut. It is just a wrong answer that arrived quickly.