The Most Underrated Career Skill? Learning to Be Versatile on Purpose
Why Your Winding Career Path Might Be Your Greatest Advantage
When people ask about my career path, I often pause before answering - not because I
don’t know what to say, but because the honest answer doesn’t fit neatly into an elevator
pitch. Concert merchandise. Wholesale showrooms. European markets. B2B luxury
sales. Entertainment partnerships. Building Arcallon. DEI advocacy.
It looks like a winding road. It really has been. From the inside, it was a strategy.
I didn’t set out to become a generalist. Like most people, I had a plan: graduate,
specialize, climb. But early in my career, a professor pulled me aside and said,
essentially, you’re not built for the path you’ve mapped out - you’re built for something
else. It stung for about a day. Then it freed me.
That redirection - from buying and planning into sales and business development -
taught me something I’ve carried ever since: versatility isn’t what happens when
you can’t commit. It’s what happens when you commit to growth over
comfort.
Versatility Is Not the Same as Inconsistency
There’s a fear, especially early in a career, of looking unfocused. We’re told to niche
down, pick a lane, become the expert. That advice isn’t wrong - but it’s incomplete.
The most effective people I’ve worked with aren’t specialists who got lucky. They’re
specialists who also understand the adjacent rooms. The sales leader who speaks fluent
brand strategy. The partnerships executive who understands creative production. The
business developer who can sit with a CFO and a creative director and translate between
both.
That’s not inconsistency. That’s compound interest on your experience.
Every skill you build doesn’t replace the last one - it multiplies it. Understanding
wholesale made me better at B2B. Working internationally made me better at reading
client needs domestically. Everything I built in corporate sales and partnerships
eventually fed into Arcallon - the business I’m building now, where the work is still
about connecting brands and people, but entirely on my own terms. Advocating for
women entrepreneurs has made me sharper at recognizing underserved markets and
underestimated talent.
Versatility, practiced intentionally, becomes a kind of fluency. And fluency opens rooms
that specialization alone cannot.
Finding the Opportunity in Every Season
Not every chapter of a career feels like progress in the moment. Some seasons feel like
maintenance. Some feel like regression. I’ve had moments of real doubt - wondering
whether a pivot was wisdom or avoidance, whether patience was virtue or stagnation.
What I’ve learned is that the seasons that felt like detours were often the ones doing the
deepest work on me. They were building tolerance for ambiguity. Expanding my
network into unexpected directions. Forcing me to develop skills I’d never have sought
out proactively.
So when I talk to women earlier in their careers, I try to offer this reframe: What if
your current chapter isn’t the obstacle to where you’re going? What if it’s
the preparation?
That shift - from “I’m not where I want to be yet” to “I’m gathering something I’ll need
later” - changes everything. It changes how you show up. It changes what you notice. It
changes what you’re willing to try.
I say this confidently as a mother of a 3-year-old, looking back, thinking this “wasn’t the
plan”.
What Versatility Actually Requires
It’s worth being honest: this doesn’t come free. Versatility, done well, requires a few
things most people underinvest in.
Curiosity over ego. The willingness to be a beginner again - to walk into a room and
know less than everyone else, and to be genuinely interested in that gap rather than
threatened by it.
Active listening. Not waiting for your turn to speak, but actually absorbing. Some of
the most important things I’ve learned came from conversations I almost talked my way
through.
Patience with your own timeline. It’s easy to mistake someone’s Chapter 10 for the
standard for Chapter 2. Set your own milestones, and trust the compounding.
A wide definition of mentorship. Mentors aren’t only the senior leaders who
formally invest in you. They’re the colleagues who model something you want to learn.
The client who gives you honest feedback. The peer who handles a hard conversation
better than you would have. If you’re paying attention, they’re everywhere.
The Bigger Picture
I’m also a DEI advocate and a champion for women entrepreneurs - and I’ll say plainly
that versatility has an equity dimension that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Women, and especially women from underrepresented backgrounds, are often told to be
more focused, more linear, more legible - in part because the gatekeepers evaluating
them are looking for familiar patterns. The winding path can read as a liability to
someone who doesn’t know how to value it.
But the women I’ve seen build the most durable careers - the ones who create something
genuinely new, who build businesses that last - almost always did it by connecting dots
no one else thought to connect. By bringing experiences together that weren’t supposed
to belong in the same room.
That is versatility as a superpower. And it is disproportionately concentrated in people
who’ve had to navigate multiple worlds to get where they are.
So if your path looks unconventional: that’s not a flaw in your story. That might
be the whole point.
The best opportunities I’ve encountered didn’t come with clear labels. They came
disguised as experiments, pivots, bridge jobs, and bold asks. The skill wasn’t in
recognizing them immediately - it was in staying curious enough, and versatile enough,
to pick them up anyway.
Be strategic. Be patient. And stay open to the version of your career that’s smarter than
your original plan.
Alexandra Rodrigues is the founder of Arcallon and a business development and partnerships
executive with more than 10 years of experience at the intersection of fashion and
entertainment. She is a DEI advocate and champion for women entrepreneurs.
