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THE
INSDER
STRATEGY
Jacqueline V. Twillie, MBA
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| Thursday Strategy · Email 5 of 20 |
April 24, 2026 |
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What You Already Know Is Worth More Than You Think
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Hey y’all,
When I ran the subscriber survey earlier this year, one of the themes that came through clearly was people sitting at the intersection of “I know I’m capable” and “I don’t know how to make them see it.” Eighteen percent of you told me you are actively working to move into a new industry or sector. One respondent put it plainly: they needed to know how to take what they’d built in one field and make it land in another.
That stuck with me. Because the challenge is rarely that your experience doesn’t translate. It’s that most professionals have been trained to think in job titles instead of capabilities, and when you’re crossing industries, job titles are the least useful thing you have.
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Industry Transitions
What the Research Shows
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Harvard Business Review has written on this for years, and the findings hold: other industries may value your skills just as much, if not more, than the one you’re leaving. The challenge is not whether the value exists. It is packaging it in a way that makes it obvious to someone who has never seen your resume category before.
That packaging problem is where most professionals give up ground. They spend energy apologizing for what they don’t have — sector credentials, a network in the new space, years of industry-specific titles — instead of leading with what they carry that nobody inside already has. Research analyzing data from over 3.5 million employees found that diversity of background and industry experience was one of the four primary drivers of stronger innovation pipelines. Cross-industry hires are not a risk tolerance decision. They are how companies solve problems they have been circling for years.
McKinsey doesn’t charge what it charges because its consultants grew up in your industry. It charges that because outside perspective is where new answers come from. When you walk into a new sector with deep expertise from somewhere else, you are that person. Most professionals just haven’t framed it that way yet.
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R4 Framework
The Reset Moment
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In Dear Resilient Leader, I built the R4 Framework around four stages: Risk, Resilience, Reset, Reward. An industry transition is a Reset moment. What I have seen across thousands of professionals is that the Reset is where people either gain ground or give it away, and the difference usually comes down to one thing: whether they show up as someone asking to be considered, or someone who has already done the work of understanding how their value applies in the new room.
The professionals who land well in new industries don’t do more. They do things differently.
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They audit their skills for impact, not function. There is a real difference between “I managed a team of twelve” and “I built a performance culture in a high-turnover environment that reduced attrition by 30%.” The first tells me what your job was. The second tells me what you can do for mine.
They build a bridge narrative. Not a story that minimizes where they’ve been, but one that reframes it as preparation. “My years in retail taught me how to read what customers actually want versus what they say they want, and that’s the intelligence that’s been missing from this sector” is a bridge narrative. It makes a hiring manager lean forward instead of crossing their arms.
They get proximate before they apply. They find people already in the new space, not to ask for jobs, but to understand the real problems. Research on over 70 million job transitions found that professionals with a broad base of foundational skills learned new things faster, earned more, and proved more resilient amid market shifts than those with only narrow specialized expertise. Getting proximate is how you start activating your foundational skills in a new context before anyone has hired you to do it.
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Your Positioning
The Question to Answer Before You Apply
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Before you send another application into a new industry cold, get clear on this: what is the specific problem this organization has that your background uniquely equips you to solve? Not generally. Specifically. If you can answer that in two sentences, you have your pitch. If you can’t answer it yet, that is the work in front of you.
Your experience across sectors is not a gap in your story. It is the story. The professionals who figure that out stop waiting to be picked and start showing up as the answer to a question the company didn’t even know how to ask.
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Podcast Feature
This Week on the Winning Season
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There is a specific moment most professionals know but rarely name out loud. The meeting where you had something to say and didn’t. The negotiation where you softened your ask before you even made it. The room where you physically felt yourself get smaller.
Denise Foss joined me on the Winning Season podcast this week and we got into exactly that: what is actually happening when you shrink in a high-stakes moment, and what it takes to come back to yourself in real time. Denise created the Stand In Your Power card deck as a tool for these moments, and this conversation goes deeper than the cards. It’s about the internal architecture of self-leadership and why reclaiming your presence looks different for everyone.
If this week’s strategy on reframing your value in a new industry landed for you, this episode is the companion to it.
Article: https://resilientleader.beehiiv.com/p/what-happens-when-you-shrink-in-a-high-stakes-moment
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-standing-in-your-power-is-not-one-size-fits-all/id1330201811?i=1000762473590
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Rooting for you,
Jacqueline
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P.S.
Next Thursday we’re going into something several of you asked about directly in the survey: how to build relationships in a new industry when you don’t know anyone yet. The network you need exists. We’ll talk about how to find your way in.
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The Insder Strategy
Resilient Leader Insder · Jacqueline V. Twillie, MBA · jacquelinetwillie.com
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