How Do You Change Careers When You Don’t Even Know What Your Skills Are Called?

Diamond Garcia knew she had skills. She just had no idea what else she could do with them. It took years of side hustles, temporary jobs, failed plans and paying attention to the work she naturally kept doing before she finally had a name for it.

At one point, while Diamond Garcia was trying to figure out how to get out of a job she hated, she remembers praying something very specific:

That got me because there’s a weird place you can end up in when you’ve been working for years and know you’re good at things, but you couldn’t tell somebody what those things add up to outside your current job.

If someone asks, “What do you do?” The response is easy. But let them ask, “What else could you do?” Ummm…

Diamond didn’t know either.

She was working for a healthcare company, a job she started when her son was born. She was 21, a single mom, had paused college and needed something that paid well and came with health insurance. At that point in her life, the job made sense.

By year five, Diamond was over it. She kept moving from department to department hoping something would click, but she was bored and felt like she had nowhere else to go. She wanted to do something more creative, and had started thinking seriously about how to get out.

Her cubicle kind of tells you where her head was at. She had covered the walls in quotes from books and calendar pages, and one stayed right above her computer. She doesn’t remember the exact wording now, but the message was basically: I will not be in this same place a year from now.

She knew she wanted a different career. She just had no idea what that career was.

She knew she wanted out before she knew where she was going

Diamond gave herself a year to figure out how she was going to leave. She was reading the books, listening to podcasts, doing all the mindset stuff, but eventually that had to turn into an actual plan. Okay…who do I know? What am I good at? What options am I missing?

So she started reaching out to women in her network and asking about opportunities. And somewhere in all of that, she found out her union offered an educational leave of absence.

This part surprised me. I had never heard of anything like it.

There were requirements, including being enrolled in school, so Diamond started a master’s program partly so she could qualify. The leave gave her a way to step away from the job without completely closing the door behind her. She could keep her benefits and still had a job to return to if everything else fell apart. Once she was out, she stopped the program and took an event coordinating job.

At this point, she still had no idea where all of this was leading. She had just found herself some room to try a few things and see what happened.

Trying something taught her what she didn’t want

Diamond had actually been experimenting years before she left healthcare. When her son was born, she opened an Etsy store selling party decor. She eventually started doing more parties and got more comfortable charging for the work.

The Etsy business actually did pretty well for a while. The problem was that Diamond had basically created a second full-time job for herself. She’d work all day, come home and spend the night filling orders, which left even less time with her son. And more time with him was one of the reasons she wanted out of her job in the first place.

So…this wasn’t it either.

She tried wedding coordination next. More money, yes. But weddings happen at night and on weekends, and Diamond didn’t want to give those up either.

Looking back, she described a lot of those years as, “I don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t want that.”

I actually love that part of her story because sometimes finding out you don’t want something is the whole point of trying it.

I’ve said this before, but you can research something to death and still not know if you’ll actually like the life that comes with it. Diamond had to run the Etsy store to realize she didn’t want to spend her nights filling orders. She had to try wedding coordination to realize better money wasn’t enough to make nights and weekends worth it to her.

Thinking through options didn’t get her closer to the answer. Actually trying something is what gave her the information she needed.

And sometimes that’s how you figure it out.

Then the plan got VERY unplanned

Diamond did eventually leave the healthcare job, but she wasn’t sitting on some big pile of savings when she did it. She told me she had no savings and was living on credit cards for a while. The educational leave gave her a year where going back was still technically an option, but then the event planning job she took didn’t work out.

And when she got down to about three months before she’d have to make that decision, she started freaking out. She was crying, trying to figure out what she was going to do, and she knew one thing for sure…she did NOT want to go back.

So she did what had worked before. She started reaching out to people.

Diamond knew a lot of entrepreneurs and figured somebody had to need help with admin work. She found a temporary VA role covering for a woman on maternity leave, then her uncle brought her into his real estate business to help behind the scenes.

She still wasn’t thinking, ah yes, THIS is my career now. She was trying to make money, stay out of the job she hated and keep moving.

And then that job with her uncle showed her something she hadn’t been able to see before.

She was already doing the work before she knew what to call it

Once Diamond started working in her uncle’s business, she kept noticing things that made her go…wait, why are y’all doing it like this?

There were gaps everywhere. Data stuff. Content. Scheduling. At one point she was basically like, hold on…you guys can’t even see each other’s calendars?

So she started fixing things. Then she fixed something else. And then something else.

Eventually it clicked that all of this stuff she kept naturally doing had an actual name.

OPERATIONS.

She told me it took her about ten years to realize that. Ten years!

And I swear, that might be my favorite part of the whole conversation because how many of us are good at something and don’t even realize it counts as a skill?

Diamond had been organizing things, spotting what wasn’t working and figuring out how to make it better for years. She just didn’t know that all of those little things added up to something businesses actually hire people to do.

You probably have your own version of that. Maybe you’re always the person who ends up cleaning up the messy project, figuring out the new tool, or fixing a process everybody else has been complaining about for six months.

When you do something naturally, it can be really easy to dismiss it. You’re like, this? Everybody can do this.

Girl…no they cannot.

And somewhere out there, somebody is literally hiring for it.

Your job title can hide a lot

Diamond eventually lost the job with her uncle when his business circumstances changed. Once again, she had to figure out what came next.

This time she wasn’t starting with nothing. She had already gone into one business, spotted what wasn’t working, fixed a bunch of it and finally realized that skill had a name.

At that point, the question became pretty simple: if I can do this here, can I do it for somebody else?

So she started telling people what she did. She networked, talked to people, asked questions and within a couple of weeks, she had her first client. Later, she started finding free networking events on Eventbrite and meeting people outside the circle she already knew.

And this is where I really liked what she said about networking, because she was NOT always naturally good at it.

She told me she used to go to events with a friend who could talk to anybody, while Diamond was sitting there like, what am I supposed to say to these people?

What changed was that she finally had something to talk about.

She knew the problems she could help solve, so instead of trying to “network,” she could just be curious. She could ask business owners what was happening behind the scenes and listen for the gaps. Sometimes she would offer an idea. Eventually the other person would ask what she did, and Diamond’s answer was basically: the thing I just showed you.

Which…that makes a lot more sense to me than walking into a room trying to convince random people to hire you.

There’s a big difference between walking into a room thinking, I need to convince somebody to hire me, and walking into it knowing, I understand this kind of problem. Let me see if anybody here has it.

So how do you figure out what your transferable skills actually are?

I keep thinking about how easy it is to miss your own skills when you’re too close to them. You think it’s just normal.

But what do people always come to you for? What are you constantly fixing, organizing or figuring out without really thinking twice about it? And when you look back across a few different jobs, is there something you somehow kept ending up responsible for?

Diamond’s work history could easily look random from the outside. Healthcare. Etsy. Events. Admin work. Real estate support. But underneath all of that, she kept doing the same kind of thing. She noticed what was off, figured out what needed to happen and made things run better.

Eventually she found out there was a name for that.

Operations.

And then she found out people would pay her for it.

You might recognize the skill after you’ve already been using it for years

Diamond’s business is still evolving. She now does systems and CRM work for entrepreneurs, and she’s experimenting with how she wants her offers to work, how she markets them and what she wants to build next.

I’m glad her story doesn’t end with her discovering the perfect career and everything clicking into place from there. That isn’t what happened.

She found something, tried it and learned from it. A job fell through. Another opportunity showed her something she hadn’t noticed about herself. She lost that job and had to make another decision. Even after finding operations, she has continued to let her business evolve with her.

Somewhere inside all of those pivots, she finally got language for something she had been doing for years.

So when somebody says, “I want to change careers, but I don’t know what else I’m qualified to do,” Diamond’s story makes me want to look past the obvious question.

The next career may have a title you haven’t discovered yet.

But there’s a chance you’ve already been doing pieces of it.

Watch my full conversation with Diamond on She Chose Again:

CONNECT WITH DIAMOND

Website: https://sparkleassoc.com/
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Diamond Garcia is the founder of Sparkles & Associates. Watch her full conversation with Elle Mills on She Chose Again, an Out of Edits interview series about what happens after women decide something needs to change.