The Decade You Left Off Your CV

For ten years, from London, I worked on the New York Stock Exchange. Running a new issues department required me to learn a different business every month or so. Hairdressing in January, hamburgers in February, regional banking in March. Not a glancing acquaintance, either. Know it well enough to form a view quickly, defend it, and be wrong in public when I was wrong.

I did that for a decade. I watched companies succeed and I watched companies fail, and because the failures were expensive I paid close attention to why. Patterns emerge when you assess businesses at that volume. You start to recognise overall business health and resilience, you get a feeling for the market, for landscape and context. 

Then I spent twenty-five years as an interior designer and seventeen of those teaching interior design.

I have recently had a profound realisation, and I can't quite believe how long the penny took to drop. When designers come to me for help with their businesses, the value I give them does not just come from the twenty-five years plus the seventeen. It also comes from the ten. It comes from a decade of rapid business assessment that has nothing to do with soft furnishings and everything to do with being able to look at a design practice and quickly see its strengths and weaknesses, and what it needs to do to grow. 

I left that decade off my website for years. I want to talk about why, because I see the same deletion in almost every designer I work with, and because I now see that the most interesting designer is the sum of all their parts, and recognising this can unlock bright and irresistible positioning. 

What an incredible gift to a business, sitting there in plain sight. 

The pattern

Graphic designers who omit to mention their background, as though the years spent making things sharp and balanced and legible were a detour from design rather than a training in it. Occupational therapists who describe their previous careers as something they had moved on from. And yet they possess an advanced professional understanding of embodiment, of how bodies actually occupy space, of accessibility as a discipline rather than a compliance exercise. More than one accountant has arrived able to speak fluently to the pain point that keeps most private clients awake, which is money, but who worry that numeracy counts against creativity, and choose instead to talk about mood boards. Project managers, capable of scheduling with a precision that would materially reduce a client's anxiety, hope their shiny design diploma will act as a sufficient distraction to redirect client attention away from a 'mundane' backstory. And then there are the HR managers, the tech developers, lawyers, and the marketers, whose superpowers include project, client, and business management. 

So many career-changer interior designers understand their history as contamination. Something that dilutes the purity of the new practice and must be scrubbed off before they can be taken seriously.

It's so easy to read this value in other designers' positioning, and yet be blind to it in our own.  

Why we hide it

There is a useful distinction, drawn originally by the sociologist Erving Goffman, between passing and covering. Passing is concealing something outright. Covering is subtler. The thing is known, or at least findable, but you keep it in the background and let more acceptable attributes sit at the front.

Nobody here is being dishonest. The accountant does not deny having been an accountant. She simply does not lead with it. She covers.

She covers for a reason that makes sense from the inside. A new professional identity takes years to set. Until it does, it feels provisional, and provisional things feel like they need protecting rather than complicating. Anything that muddies the picture reads as a risk. So you keep the story simple, and the simplest version of the story is the one where you have always been a designer. 

And you didn't just retrain at eye-watering expense and risk everything only to be pigeonholed right back where you started. Or maybe some stereotyping around an old career feels like a threat if associated with the new one. 

We all have such impostor syndrome about our creativity, our design credentials, that we hide anything we fear might pull perceptions of our capabilities in a different direction.

That instinct is understandable. But I argue that it's also, commercially, potentially costly.

What clients are actually able to judge

I have written about credence goods here before, but in case you missed it: 

Economists divide purchases into three kinds. There are things you can assess before you buy them. There are things you can only assess afterwards. And there is a third kind, which they call credence goods, where the buyer cannot reliably judge the quality even after the work is finished. 

Design sits largely in that third category. A client can tell you whether they like the finished room. What they cannot tell, ever, is whether it is a good room, in the sense of being the best available outcome for that budget, that building and that brief. They will never see the myriad versions other designers might have produced. That comparison is invisible, permanently.

This matters because of what buyers do when they can't accurately judge the quality of what will be delivered. They do not stop deciding. They fall back on whatever is visible and comparable. Portfolio images, which increasingly look alike. Qualifications, which are identical by design, since standardising practitioners is what training exists to do. Referrals, when they can get them. And price, which is the most visible and most comparable thing in the whole transaction.

This doubt about everything else - the inability to pin down difference - is the real mechanism behind being shopped on fee. It is not that clients are cheap. It is that you have given them nothing else to choose on. Take away every distinguishing fact about who you are and what you know, and price is what remains. Identikit marketing does not simply fail to differentiate you. It sets up the fee comparison, because it has removed every other basis for deciding.

Why the old career is the asset

There is a long-established test in business strategy for whether an asset will hold its value or be competed away. Four questions.

Is it valuable.

Is it rare.

Is it difficult to copy.

Is it difficult to replace with something else.

Assets that fail the test get commoditised. Assets that pass tend to keep earning.

Put your design qualification through it. Valuable, certainly. Rare, no, thousands of people hold one. Difficult to copy, not remotely, since making it reproducible is the entire point of a course. It is a commodity input, however much it cost you and however hard it was to get.

Now put the thing you are hiding through the same test. Ten years assessing businesses under time pressure cannot be copied because it cannot be enrolled in. Nobody sells it. A decade of clinical practice is not available to a competitor who decides to specialise in wellness. Fifteen years of managing money and controlling costs is not a weekend course. Your past experience means that in certain respects your judgement is unusually good, which is a distinction to celebrate and draw attention to as part of your marketing. 

The thing you have been hiding is one of the few genuinely non-replicable assets in your business.

There is good evidence that people who sit between two otherwise separate fields produce ideas that are consistently rated as better than those of people embedded in one, because they can see options that are invisible from inside either field. Standing between two bodies of knowledge is not a biographical curiosity. It is a working advantage, and it is where most of your best thinking is coming from already.

What to change

Not necessarily your About page. This is not a suggestion that you add a line about your former life and consider the matter addressed. Three changes, in ascending order of difficulty.

1. Find the decisions your old competence is already making. Go back through a recent project and mark every point where you exercised judgement that a designer without your history would not have exercised. Where did your years of prior experience bring value to the project? The occupational therapist is not choosing a chair, she is making load, reach and transfer decisions that an aesthetic training does not equip you to make. The accountant is not selecting stone, she is running a whole-life cost calculation while she selects it. Those decisions are the product. Most designers have never explained the unique expertise and excellence present in their practice.

2. Describe the judgement rather than the deliverable. Almost every design proposition describes outputs, and outputs are near identical across the profession, which makes them comparable on price and very little else. Describe your custom process instead - custom process can be as defining as a distinct design style. This change alters what the client is comparing.

3. Raise it early. The previous career belongs in the qualification conversation, not the fee defence. Its job is to change which category the client believes they are shopping in, and it can only do that before they have started counting. Offered after a fee objection, it sounds defensive. Offered at first enquiry, it reframes everything that follows. They aren't just hiring an interior designer, they are hiring an interior designer/accountant, an interior designer/occupational therapist, an interior designer/lawyer. 

The point

The urge to cover is not dishonest and it is not a failure of nerve. It is what people reasonably do while a new identity is still setting, and it passes on its own.

The missed opportunity in your business does not. Every year spent presenting as a generic instance of your profession is another year competing on the only distinction visible, which is cost.

Your past life is already flavouring your new career, you don't see it because you don't value it, it's 'normal'. You don't need to become a different designer. You need to celebrate the part of yourself that elevates your business above the competition.