I hear this a lot:

“I’ve got agency experience, but in-house teams don’t know what to do with me.”

Or: “My skills are too broad, companies want specialists.”

That’s not a skills gap. That’s a positioning gap.

When I hired designers, here’s what usually happened:

An agency designer would show a slick deck of dozens of projects.

Beautiful, polished.

But what I really wanted to know was: Can this person drive outcomes in our messy system?

The story I walked away with was “generalist, maybe flashy, not sure if they can focus.”

Here’s the trap:

You think your job is to show everything you can do.

But hiring managers don’t want to see everything. They want to see a clear line between what you’ve done and the problem they need solved.

Think about a radio dial.

Your portfolio might be playing 10 songs at once.

The hiring manager just hears noise.

Your job is to tune it to one clear station so they get the signal.

Here’s the reframe:

Positioning isn’t about changing your past.

It’s about changing the story you tell about your past.

Same work. Different framing. Different reaction.

So instead of:

→ “I’ve done a bit of everything.”

Try:

→ “Because I’ve done a bit of everything, I know how to connect the dots and solve X problem that your team struggles with.”

One coaching question for you:

👉 If you had to pick one thread that ties all your work together — what would it be?

That’s the story that cuts through the noise. And that’s the signal in-house teams are really listening for.

Inside the Career Creators Library ($25/week), I break down how to sharpen that story so broad backgrounds look like unique advantages. Scripts, examples, and positioning frameworks included.

Join here → https://community.careercreators.com/invitation?code=2AJ276

Takeaway for today: it’s not the portfolio that’s too broad. It’s the story that’s too blurry.