Why Knowing Your Strengths Gives You a Career Edge
What if the key to getting ahead wasn’t learning new skills, but leveraging the ones you already have? Knowing your strengths—or ‘comparative advantages’—can unlock your potential and give you a career edge.
The Power of Knowing Your Strengths in Your Career
The concept of comparative advantage, borrowed from Economics 101, is surprisingly applicable to your professional life. But don't let the academic-sounding term intimidate you. At its core, comparative advantage is about knowing your strengths and leveraging what you're relatively better at than others.
Having a comparative advantage does not necessarily mean being the best in absolute terms. For example, you don't need to be a finalist at the Microsoft Excel World Championships (yes, that's a real competition!) for your Excel skills to be a comparative advantage. If you're more proficient with spreadsheets than your colleagues who struggle with basic functions, that's a comparative advantage worth leveraging.
Comparative advantages are not just things you are born with, they are skills and experiences that you can actively develop. A comparative advantage can come from various sources including:
Innate insights, like understanding the medical field from growing up in a family of doctors
Developed skills through education and experience, such as coding websites or engineering skyscrapers
Your hobbies and interests that you have spent a lot of time doing
Unique combinations of knowledge and expertise that set you apart in your field
The MILES Framework: A Tool for Identifying Your Strengths
Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba, authors of "The Unfair Advantage," introduce the MILES framework – a powerful tool for identifying your comparative advantages:
Money
Access to resources or capital can be a significant advantage. Whether it's family wealth to fund a startup or savings that allow you to pursue full-time retraining, financial resources can create opportunities.
Intelligence/Insight
This encompasses both analytical skills and unique perspectives from personal experiences. Take the founder of Deliveroo, who recognised London's lacking food delivery options because of his experience with superior services in New York. His insight, developed from personal experience, helped identify a massive market opportunity.
Location/Luck
Your geographical position can significantly impact your opportunities. A tech professional in Silicon Valley naturally has greater access to networking events, venture capitalists, and job opportunities compared to someone in a less tech-focused region.
Education/Expertise
Specialised knowledge and skills form a crucial advantage. A software developer with a master's degree in artificial intelligence, for instance, becomes a prime candidate for high-paying roles in machine learning.
Status
Your social networks and professional reputation can open doors. A corporate lawyer with a strong personal brand and influential contacts can attract prestigious clients, creating a cycle of growth and opportunity.
Finding Your Comparative Advantages
Everyone has some areas of comparative advantage, even if you feel you don’t, you do - the key is to identify and leverage them. Some questions to ask yourself to help you identify your own comparative advantages are:
What experiences have you had over the last 5 years that could provide valuable insights to others facing similar challenges?
What have you invested significant time in learning or doing?
What tasks do you find surprisingly easy that others struggle with?
The Strategic Importance of Understanding Your Advantages
Cal Newport, in "So Good They Can't Ignore You," challenges the common advice to "follow your passion." Instead, he advocates for building careers by developing and leveraging strengths that are both valuable and rare – what he terms "career capital."
The key is to focus on what value you can offer to the world rather than what the world can offer you. By identifying and leveraging your comparative advantages, you can become, as Newport puts it, "so good they can't ignore you."
Consider taking this a step further by finding career paths that combine multiple comparative advantages that are both valuable and rare. For instance, someone who excels at both data analysis and explaining complex insights to non-experts has a powerful combination of skills that's particularly valuable in today's data-driven world.
Leveraging Your Career Superpowers
Your comparative advantages are your career superpowers. Leverage these by taking time to:
Reflect on your strengths using the MILES framework
Identify career paths that specifically value your unique combination of advantages
Consider developing complementary skills that amplify your existing strengths
Remember, everyone has areas of comparative advantage, even if they don't realise it yet. The key is identifying these advantages and strategically leveraging them to create career opportunities.