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ENGINEER / FORWARD →
with Izzy House
an original column for Hire Perspectives
This is another seemingly simple question with a potentially life-defining answer.
In Outside the Pipeline, we started by asking “Who do I want to become?” Before building a résumé, pursuing the next position, or trying to make ourselves more visible, we needed some idea of where we wanted to go.
Then, in Who Do You Think You Are?, we took a closer look at the assumptions we carry about ourselves. Were we making decisions based on who we are today, or on old data, other people’s expectations, and stories we’d accepted somewhere along the way?
Now we’re ready for the next question:
What do you bring to the table?
At first glance, this one seems easier. We can list our degrees, technical skills, certifications, years of experience, software proficiency, and the projects we’ve worked on. Those things matter. They tell people what we know and what we can do.
But I’m asking something deeper.
What happens because you’re there?
What do you contribute that changes the outcome? What problems become easier to solve? What does a team gain when you walk into the room? What do people rely on you for, even when it isn’t written anywhere in your job description?
Maybe you’re the person who sees the connection everyone else missed. Maybe you can take a complicated technical problem and explain it in a way that gets everyone moving in the same direction. Maybe you’re calm when something breaks, willing to ask the question nobody else wants to ask, or able to spot a problem before it becomes an expensive one.
Maybe people simply work better when you’re in the room.
That’s value.
Why Value Matters
An employer isn’t simply hiring a collection of skills. They are investing in what those skills, and the person using them, can produce.
Your value might show up in the product you help create, the problem you solve, the customer you retain, or the idea that opens a new opportunity. It can also show up in less obvious ways: the team you help make more cohesive, the friction you eliminate, the creativity you encourage, or the process you make more efficient.
All of those things affect performance. Better teams produce better work. Less friction saves time and money. Creative thinking can improve products and uncover opportunities. Strong communication can prevent expensive mistakes.
Ultimately, an employer needs your contribution to create value for the organization. In business, that value eventually connects to the bottom line: helping create revenue, protect revenue, reduce costs, improve productivity, or strengthen the organization’s ability to succeed.
That is why understanding what you bring to the table matters.
Why This Question Is So Hard
What do you bring to the table? It sounds like a simple question until you actually try to answer it.
Part of the problem is perspective. You have never experienced a team without you on it. You don’t get to observe the meeting where you weren’t there to ask the question everyone had overlooked, the project where you weren’t there to connect two ideas, or the difficult moment when your calm presence might have changed the tone of the room.
It’s difficult to measure the difference you make when you’ve never experienced the version where you weren’t there.
Some of what you contribute may also be so deeply woven into your personality that you don’t recognize it as a contribution. Being you feels normal to you. The way you think, respond, communicate, solve problems, or interact with people is simply how you move through the world. You don’t have another version of yourself for comparison.
Being you feels normal to you.
Another reason we don’t spend much time thinking about our value is that it can feel a little vain.
Many of us were taught to be humble, give credit to the team, and avoid bragging about ourselves. Those are good qualities. But humility and self-awareness aren’t opposites. There is a difference between believing you’re more valuable than everyone else and understanding the value you contribute.
In fact, we can become so good at minimizing ourselves that we dismiss useful evidence. Anyone could have done that. It wasn’t a big deal. I was just doing my job. Maybe. But maybe you did something particularly well, and understanding why matters.
Recognizing your strengths doesn’t diminish anyone else’s. You don’t have to make yourself smaller to be humble.
Understanding what you bring to the table isn’t vanity. It’s data.
Skills Are Only Part of the Story
Early in our careers, we’re taught to collect skills. We earn degrees, complete certifications, learn software, master processes, and accumulate experience. Those things become the building blocks of our careers, and they deserve a place on our résumés and CVs.
But somewhere along the way, we need to learn how to answer a different question.
What do I do with those skills that matters to someone else?
Knowing how to analyze data is a skill. Recognizing a pattern that prevents a costly mistake creates value.
Being able to write is a skill. Translating a complex technical idea so a customer, executive, or community can understand it creates value.
Project management is a skill. Bringing order to a complicated project, keeping people connected, and moving a team toward the finish line creates value.
A skill becomes valuable when it creates an outcome that matters to your team, your organization, your customer, or the people you serve.
But value doesn’t always produce an outcome that is easy to measure.
The engineer who can walk into chaos and immediately see how the pieces fit together may think, “That’s just how I think.” The person everyone turns to when a project gets difficult may never put “builds trust” on a résumé. The quiet team member who asks one question that changes the direction of a meeting may not think of that moment as leadership.
So look for the patterns.
What do people consistently ask you to help with?
When something goes wrong, why do they call you?
What do colleagues thank you for?
What problems seem to find their way to you because people know you’ll figure them out?
Those patterns are data, and they offer valuable clues about what you bring to the people around you.
The things you barely notice about yourself may be the very things other people notice most. They may tell you more about your value than a list of technical proficiencies ever could.
Value Is Bigger Than the Job Description
Job descriptions are useful, but they describe a role. They don’t fully describe the person who will occupy it.
Two engineers can have the same degree, similar experience, and nearly identical technical qualifications and still bring very different value to a team.
One may be exceptional at finding flaws before they become failures. Another may connect disciplines that rarely communicate well. One may thrive when the problem is ambiguous. Another may build processes that turn ambiguity into repeatability. Someone else may have a gift for teaching younger engineers, working with customers, building relationships, or helping a team stay focused when the pressure rises.
None is inherently more valuable than the others.
They’re valuable in different ways.
That’s why understanding your value isn’t about proving that you’re better than the person sitting next to you. It’s about understanding what becomes possible because you’re there.
Your Point of Value
This is where all of those pieces come together.
In Outside the Pipeline, I called it your Point of Value. It isn’t one skill, personality trait, accomplishment, or line on your résumé. It’s the particular way you create value through the combination of what you know, how you think, how you work, and how you affect the people and outcomes around you.
And here’s the important part:
Your Point of Value is more than something you discover once and put on a shelf. You choose it, then you build it. Throughout your life, you keep reevaluating, learning, and growing, intentionally building the best version of yourself.
You choose it, then you build it.
You Decide What You Bring
So how do you build it?
Some qualities may come naturally. Others are developed deliberately over years. You can decide to become a better listener. You can learn to communicate more clearly, become more dependable, ask better questions, handle pressure with greater composure, encourage the people around you, or become the person who follows through when you say you will.
Knowing who you want to be is one thing. Becoming known for those qualities requires practice.
You don’t become trustworthy by deciding that trust is important. You build trust by keeping your word and following through, especially when it would be easier not to. You don’t become a good leader because you have “leadership” in your title. You become one through the hundreds of decisions you make about how you treat people, respond when things go wrong, share credit, accept responsibility, and show up when someone needs you.
In other words, you have to walk the walk.
Walk the walk.
This is where personal values become more than words we use to describe ourselves. They become behaviors other people can experience. If you say you value collaboration, people should experience collaboration when they work with you. If you want to be someone others can trust, your actions have to give them reasons to trust you. If you want to be known as curious, generous, creative, dependable, or courageous, those qualities have to show up in what you actually do.
And that takes us to something we don’t completely control:
You don’t get to choose your reputation. It is shaped by how others experience and perceive you. But you do get to choose many of the actions that influence it.
Other People Can Help You See It
Sometimes we’re too close to ourselves to recognize the pattern.
This is where other people can provide useful data. Ask a few people who have worked closely with you a simple question:
When have you seen me at my best?
Don’t tell them what you think the answer should be. Listen.
You may hear the same words repeatedly. Calm. Creative. Thorough. Curious. Reliable. Strategic. Patient. Resourceful. Perhaps they remember a situation you barely thought about at the time.
Pay attention to the stories they tell, not just the adjectives they use.
“Reliable” is nice. But, “When everything went sideways, you were the person who organized the team and figured out what we needed to do next” tells you something much more useful.
That’s evidence of value.
Learn to Put It Into Words
Recognizing your value is only part of the work. Eventually, you need to be able to communicate it.
How do you capture in mere words something that other people experience when they work with you?
This is where many incredibly capable people struggle. How do you capture in mere words something that other people experience when they work with you? How do you explain that you bring calm to chaos, make complicated ideas understandable, build trust, spark creativity, or somehow help a team work better together?
It is much easier to say, “I managed this project,” than to explain what was different because you managed it.
But if you can’t put your value into words, you are relying on other people to recognize it on their own.
And they may not.
Try asking yourself:
What problem existed?
What did I contribute?
What changed because of it?
Those questions help translate something that can feel intangible into evidence. They connect your skills and personal qualities to the outcomes they helped create.
You are articulating a story about yourself that reflects something real. You are learning how to put words around the value you already create. When our words reflect our real experiences, behaviors, and outcomes, they feel authentic, and people can sense when something rings true.
When your words are grounded in evidence, confidence has something solid to stand on. You know what you bring to the table, and you have the evidence to support it.
Learning to put that evidence into words helps you understand yourself more clearly, advocate for your ideas, talk about your accomplishments, and recognize the opportunities where you can contribute most.
And once you know your value and can articulate it authentically, you are ready to learn how to market it.
…But that is a conversation for a future article. Stay tuned.
What Do You Bring to the Table?
Maybe the answer is technical expertise. Maybe it’s curiosity, judgment, creativity, calm under pressure, communication, leadership, persistence, or an unusual combination of experiences that allows you to see a problem differently.
Most likely, it’s several of those things working together.
Your job is to notice the pattern.
Because once you understand what you bring to the table, something interesting happens. You become better at recognizing the teams where that value matters, the problems you’re particularly equipped to solve, the skills worth developing next, and the opportunities that move you toward the person you want to become.
You also become better at explaining why you belong in the room and why you have something valuable to contribute once you have a seat at the table.
So take another look at the evidence you’ve been collecting.
Start with the question:
What am I good at?
Identify your skills, strengths, natural abilities, and the things other people consistently rely on you to do.
But explore those answers further with a bigger question:
What becomes possible because I’m here?
How does what you’re good at affect the people, projects, and organizations around you? What works better? What problems get solved? What ideas get stronger? What friction disappears? What do you help create, protect, improve, or move forward?
That’s where you begin to see the difference between what you’re good at and the value you create because of it.
Then ask yourself again:
What do I bring to the table?
Actions & Outcomes
Understanding what you bring to the table takes more than identifying a list of skills. These exercises are designed to help you recognize the value you already create, decide what you want to develop, and begin putting that value into words.
Keep what you create here. The evidence you collect can become a resource you return to throughout your career, especially when you need to remind yourself what you are capable of. We will explore how to use that evidence to intentionally build confidence in a future article.
1. What am I good at?
Start by making a list of your skills, strengths, natural abilities, and qualities.
Include the obvious things: technical expertise, certifications, software, processes, subject-matter knowledge, and professional experience. Then go beyond them. What comes naturally to you? What do people consistently ask you to help with? What do colleagues thank you for? When something gets difficult, why do people come to you?
Think about how you communicate, solve problems, work with people, respond under pressure, generate ideas, organize information, build relationships, or help others succeed.
Give yourself permission to make the list long.
Outcome: A broader inventory of what you bring to the table, including strengths and qualities that may never appear in a job description.
2. What becomes possible because I’m here?
Now take the items on your list and connect them to impact.
For each one, ask: What becomes possible because I’m here?
Perhaps your attention to detail catches problems early. Your communication skills help technical and nontechnical teams understand one another. Your curiosity generates new ideas. Your calm presence helps a team think clearly under pressure. Your organizational skills reduce friction and keep a project moving.
Look for what your contribution helps create, improve, protect, solve, save, strengthen, or move forward.
Then use the three questions from the article:
What problem existed?
What did I contribute?
What changed because of it?
Write down specific examples whenever you can.
Outcome: Evidence connecting what you are good at to the value it creates for other people, teams, projects, customers, and organizations.
3. What do I want to bring to the table?
Your Point of Value includes who you are today, and it also reflects the person you are intentionally building.
Look at your first two exercises. Which qualities do you want to strengthen? What would you like people to experience when they work with you? Perhaps you want to become a better listener, communicator, mentor, problem-solver, leader, collaborator, or source of creative thinking.
Choose three to five qualities you want to develop intentionally.
Then ask yourself: What would someone actually see me doing if I consistently demonstrated this quality?
If you choose trustworthy, perhaps that means keeping commitments and following through. If you choose collaborative, perhaps it means inviting other perspectives and sharing credit. If you choose curious, perhaps it means asking better questions and exploring ideas beyond your immediate responsibilities.
Turn the qualities into behaviors you can practice.
Outcome: A deliberate picture of the value you want to develop, along with specific behaviors that help you build it.
4. How do other people experience me?
Now collect some outside data.
Choose three to five people who have worked with you closely. They might be colleagues, former managers, mentors, customers, teammates, or people you have led.
Ask them one question:
When have you seen me at my best?
Then really listen.
For this exercise, give yourself one rule: you may only speak to repeat back what you heard to confirm your understanding or to ask another question.
Resist the instinct to explain what happened, add context, minimize a compliment, or defend yourself against something that surprises you. Your job in this conversation is to understand how the other person experiences you.
You might say, “What I hear you saying is that I helped keep everyone focused when things became stressful. Is that what you mean?” Then follow their answer with another question: “What made that stand out to you?” “When else have you seen that in me?” “What do you think I bring to a team?”
Let pauses happen. Give the person time to think. Listen for understanding, not for your opportunity to respond.
Pay attention to repeated words, behaviors, and situations. Compare their answers with the qualities you identified for yourself.
Outcome: An outside perspective on the value you create and additional evidence that can reveal strengths you may have overlooked.
5. How do I put my value into words?
Bring everything together.
Review your lists, examples, and feedback. Look for patterns:
What qualities appear repeatedly?
What kinds of problems do you tend to solve?
What outcomes do you help create?
What do people consistently rely on you to contribute?
Now try completing this thought:
I create value by______________________.
Write several versions. Give yourself room to experiment until the words sound like you and reflect the evidence you have collected.
Then support your statement with two or three specific examples. For each example, work through this framework:
What problem existed?
What did I contribute?
What changed because of it?
You now have language you can draw from when writing a résumé or bio, preparing for an interview or performance review, introducing yourself, pursuing an opportunity, or simply reminding yourself of what you contribute.
Outcome: A clear, authentic description of your Point of Value, supported by real evidence and examples.
About Izzy House
Izzy House is an author, aerospace communications strategist, and marketing leader who believes education and inspiration have the power to transform lives. Through her writing, speaking, and work with leaders across the commercial space industry, she promotes the exciting world of space and inspires people to pursue careers with purpose.
As the author of both business and children’s books, Izzy believes curiosity, continuous learning, and meaningful relationships create opportunities at every stage of life. Her writing helps readers understand complex ideas, communicate with confidence, and recognize the unique value they bring to the world.
Inspire the child who might become an engineer.
Develop the engineer who might become a leader.
Empower the leader who might change the world.
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