How to Fix Your Positioning if You're an Expert

You have a PhD. Or 15 years of deep specialist experience. Or both.

You know your field inside out. You've published, presented, led projects, solved problems that would make other people's heads spin.

And yet.

When you introduce yourself, people nod politely and move on. When you apply for roles, you get "overqualified" or, worse, silence. When someone asks what you do, you get bored reaction.

And you know what, I'm 99.99% sure that the problem is your positioning.

Your expertise is the foundation. But positioning is the architecture that makes it usable, visible, and relevant to the people who need it.

I've built a framework for this. Nine components. Not because I love frameworks (okay, I do, I'm a researcher at heart), but because I kept seeing the same gaps over and over again in the profiles, CVs, and pitches of brilliant people who can't figure out why no one cares.

So let me walk you through it:

1. Professional identity: what you choose to be known for

This is the starting point, and it's where almost everyone gets stuck.

In academia for example, your identity is handed to you. You're a doctoral researcher, a postdoc, a lecturer in X. The institution, the department, the title, they do the positioning work for you. You never have to think about it because the system thinks about it on your behalf.

Outside academia, no one is going to infer your identity from your credentials. If you don't define it clearly, other people will define it for you. And they'll usually default to something narrow, junior, or just wrong.

Professional identity is what you are deliberately choosing to be known for in your next context. Not everything you could be. Not everything you've done. The thing you're leading with.

Practical guidance:

Pick one primary identity per professional direction. Make it something you can say in a single sentence when someone asks what you do. If it needs a paragraph of explanation, it's not ready yet.

And unless it's genuinely strategic for where you're headed, drop the word "academic" from your positioning. It triggers assumptions you'll spend months trying to undo.

2. Direction and positioning: where your profile is aimed

A profile that tries to keep all options open is a profile that's usable for none of them.

I understand the instinct. You've got a broad skill set, you're not sure which direction will work out, and you don't want to close doors. So you write something vague and flexible, hoping it covers enough ground.

It doesn't. It just makes you forgettable.

Direction means assuming a specific role family, industry, or type of work, and optimising your entire profile for clarity in that direction. You can always adjust later. But "open to anything" is not a direction. It's a signal that you haven't done the thinking yet, and hiring managers read it exactly that way.

Pick a lane. You can change lanes. But you have to be in one first.

3. Core contribution: the problems you solve

This is where experts consistently undersell themselves, because academia trains you to talk about what you studied, not what you solved.

But business decisions are driven by problems. Someone has a gap, a risk, a question they can't answer, a decision they need to make with incomplete information. Your value lives in how you address those situations, not in the topic of your dissertation.

Core contribution is about the problems you address and the situations where you're genuinely useful, framed around responsibility and judgement rather than tasks.

For example:

Instead of "I conducted qualitative research on organisational behaviour," try "I diagnose why teams underperform and design interventions that actually change how people work together."

Same expertise. Completely different positioning.

Frame your contribution around problems, decisions, and responsibility. Avoid words like "support" or "assist" unless you're pairing them with clear ownership. "I supported the leadership team" tells me nothing. "I built the analysis that changed how the leadership team allocated their budget" tells me everything.

4. Core capability set: how you create value

This is not a skills list. I repeat: this is not a skills list.

Your core capability set is the distinctive, repeatable pattern of how you work. It's the thing that makes you effective across different projects and contexts, the method underneath the madness.

Think of it as your operating system, not your app store.

Three to five capabilities, maximum. Each one should be a pattern of work, not a personality trait. "Analytical" is not a capability. "Breaking down complex, ambiguous problems into structured decision frameworks" is.

And each capability should clearly enable your core contribution. If it doesn't connect back to the problems you solve, it doesn't belong in your positioning. Save it for the interview.

5. Level of operation and responsibility: where you sit

Are you executional, advisory, strategic? Because if you don't say it, people will assume execution. Every time.

This is one of the most painful defaults for experienced experts. You've been operating at a high level, making judgement calls, advising senior stakeholders, shaping strategy, but because you haven't stated it explicitly, you get slotted into junior categories.

Silence on level defaults you downwards. Always.

Be explicit about the scope you've operated at. Anchor it in accountability and outcomes, not years of experience. "10 years in research" doesn't signal level. "Accountable for a €2M research programme with direct reporting to the executive board" does.

And please, don't claim a level you haven't actually operated at. Aspirational positioning without evidence doesn't build credibility. It destroys it.

6. Stakeholder focus: who relies on your work

Business is relational. Every role exists in relation to other people, the ones who depend on your judgement, your output, your expertise.

Naming your stakeholders is one of the fastest ways to signal your professional level without having to argue for it. "I work with data" positions you very differently from "I advise C-suite leaders on data-driven strategy."

Same person, potentially. Completely different perception.

Identify one or two primary stakeholder groups. Think about who actually relies on your judgement in your work. Then use those stakeholders to signal your position in the ecosystem.

This is subtle, but works well. The stakeholders you name tell people where you sit in an organisation faster than any title can.

7. Value logic: why your contribution matters

This is the "so what?" component, and it's the one that separates a decent profile from a compelling one.

Value logic connects what you do to what improves because you're involved. It's explicit cause and effect. Not "I add value to teams" (which means nothing) but "When I'm involved, product decisions are grounded in actual user data instead of assumptions, which means fewer expensive pivots after launch."

See the difference? One is a claim. The other is a mechanism.

Relevance is judged by impact, not effort. Nobody cares how hard you worked. They care what changed because you were there. Focus on stakeholder outcomes, what gets better, faster, cheaper, clearer, less risky, and make the causal chain visible.

If you can't articulate your value logic, your positioning has a hole in it. Full stop.

8. Evidence of impact: why your profile is believable

Business audiences are sceptical. Especially of people coming from academia, because they've been burned before by hires who were brilliant in theory and lost in practice.

So your evidence needs to do one thing above all: prove that you've applied your expertise in contexts that matter to them.

The key here is patterns, not isolated highlights. One impressive achievement can be a fluke. Three examples of the same type of impact across different contexts? That's a track record.

Choose evidence that supports the direction you're heading, not evidence that documents your full history. A beautifully detailed account of your PhD fieldwork is irrelevant if you're positioning yourself for a strategy role in tech. But the fact that you independently managed a two-year project with ambiguous scope, multiple stakeholders, and no clear playbook? That's gold. Frame it that way.

Relevance beats completeness. Always.

9. Boundaries and exclusions: what you're not

This is the component that surprises people, but it might be the most important one for senior positioning.

Clear boundaries increase trust. When you say "I don't do X," you're not limiting yourself. You're signalling that you've thought carefully about where you're most effective and where you're not. That's a sign of professional maturity, and experienced hiring managers and clients recognise it immediately.

State your boundaries calmly. No defensiveness, no apology. "I work at the strategic level and don't take on implementation-heavy roles" is a perfectly reasonable boundary that also happens to position you as senior.

Exclusions prevent miscategorisation, which is one of the biggest time-wasters in any career transition. Every hour you spend in conversations about roles that were never right for you is an hour you're not spending on the ones that are.

Putting it together

Nine components. Each one does a specific job. Together, they build a professional profile that is clear, credible, and actually usable by the people reading it.

But here's what I want you to take away more than the framework itself:

Positioning is not about making yourself smaller. It's not about hiding your complexity or dumbing down your expertise. It's about making a deliberate choice about how you show up professionally, and then making that choice legible to the people who need to understand it.

You've spent years building expertise. That's done. The work now is making sure that expertise shows as it should.

Start with component one. Write down what you want to be known for. If you can say it clearly in one sentence, you're ahead of 90% of the experts I know.

If you can't, that's exactly where the work begins.