The Valley of Skill

My best and highest paying work resides in the Valley of Skill. I wonder how long that valley will last before it’s filled completely.

As usual, I read a new post on Ludicity (The Worlds Left To Conquer) and feel compelled to write again. Please read his post rather than forcing me to paraphrase it, because otherwise I will do a shabby job of it and he might shout at me. I don’t want that.

What I do want to do is draw a parallel between our industries - his in software development (a gross oversimplification, but we’ll let that stand), and mine in helping small companies navigate the hellscape that is modern public sector procurement in the UK.

The fact that Hermit Tech has been so enormously successful is down to the lack of competence that seems endemic to the software industry. I’m planning for the Great Leap into the unknown, and the one hurdle that defeats me all of the time is my perception of my competition - i.e. being more effective and competent than me.

If you’d read any of my other posts or even listened to me ranting for more than three minutes on the subject, you’d realise that is simply not true. Not true at all. In fact, it’s an offshoot of my habit of Torturing Myself On The Internet, which is to spend fifteen minutes a day on the business site for business people that is LinkedIn.

That daily dose is sufficient to top up my never dwindling supply of Imposter Syndrome and convince myself to sit back down in the chair and don’t even think about moving. Yep; most days I can reduce myself to the feeling of a small child by spending fifteen minutes on the internet, despite having buckets of evidence to the contrary.

But I’m not writing this to complain about my own limits, lack of, or perceived lack of. Despite the Thought Leadership on the Cursed Hellsite For Business People, the vast majority of expertise is see is… not good.

With deferential reference to the Ludicity post You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride, I have read many articles and publications on the art of procurement. Many have been from our Blessed Crown Commercial Services, and their guidance largely amounts to ‘read the documents’ for the uninitiated.

Most other content has been written by experts, of whom there are many, matched only by the sheer number of people purporting to expertise that are beholden to software companies who are just dying to sell you the Holy Seat Of Software Licencing for their new shiny product that includes AI.

But the vast majority of people I work with - small businesses or those who may have spent time working on tender responses - are largely immune to all of this expertise. They bumble along in their lane, relentlessly copying and pasting content from that ‘one bid that did well’, and call that good enough. For those of us who claim expertise in this field, this is very clearly not good enough at all, and if we tried to follow the same path for more than one working day you would find our corpses by the trail of pins that eventually ended up in our eyes.

I am being dramatic for writing effect, of course. There is a beauty in this madness that is so often blindly followed; it drives business. I don’t spend my time decrying these practices, because I can earn money by helping these poor souls. The spectacular irony is that those who languish on the Hell Site That Is LinkedIn, Purveyor Of All That Is Right And Holy In The World Of Business, and post endlessly about the ‘best way to do the work’, are the ones who probably do little to actually help.

I spend my time trying to make myself redundant. A long term contract with a client who treats me as an expert resource is nice, of course, but it doesn’t take long before I’m questioning their motives. Surely, if you treat business acquisition as a key element of your company, you should be working hard to Get Good at every part of it? Surely, if the cost of hiring a consultant is substantially higher than employing someone (and using your expensive consultant to train them), then you’d do that?

If the processes I create and the expertise doesn’t land with a client, then the long term contract turns into a trap of skill. I have the skill, they have no desire to learn it, and they are happy to pay the price.

Perhaps I don’t understand how modern businesses work.

Perhaps I never will.

In the meanwhile, that valley of skill is where I earn my money. Perhaps I should stop wishing it away.