The Hat I Can Wear

For about two years I have been trying to invent a job title.

Not apply for one. Invent one. I had a running list — communications strategist, narrative systems analyst, policy intelligence lead, something with "architect" in it — each one a small act of engineering meant to build a category with exactly one person in it. Me. I would write the title, write the description underneath it, read it back, and feel that brief satisfaction of having solved something. Then I would go look at actual job postings, and the feeling would evaporate.

I did this over and over. I want to be honest about how much time it took, because that's the part nobody writes about. It is not one dramatic evening of soul-searching. It is months. It is the same four ideas cycling through your head at 2 a.m. while you try to figure out whether the through-line in your work is real or whether you have just been telling yourself a story about it. Whether you built something over your professional life or wasted it.

The problem was not the résumé

The résumé is genuinely varied. Close to a decade in Washington State government relations and lobbying. A stretch running marketing and brand strategy for a motorcycle helmet brand, where I took North American revenue from zero to three and a half million dollars in thirty months. A graduate degree in information systems. A consulting practice. Board service on a legislative advocacy campaign. Photography and design work good enough that people pay for it.

Every hiring manager I met could see the range. That was never the issue. The issue is that range without a container reads as unfocused, and unfocused loses to specialized every single time. I lost roles to people with fifteen straight years in one discipline. I lost roles to people with the exact relationships the job required. Those were not bad decisions by the people making them. Given how I presented myself, they were the right decisions.

So I kept trying to fix it by building a better category. A more precise invented title. A cleverer framing.

That was the mistake. You cannot build a category around yourself and then wait for the market to adopt it. Categories are how other people find you. If I invent one, nobody is searching for it.

The answer was simpler and less flattering than I wanted

What I actually needed was not a new category. It was a hat — one that already exists, that people already recognize, and that lets me move between industries instead of trapping me in one.

I am a project manager. It is the work I have done since the beginning.

I resisted this for a long time, and I think I resisted it because it sounded ordinary. There is an ego cost to arriving somewhere plain after that much agonizing. But once I stopped flinching at it, I could not unsee it. Every piece of work I am actually proud of was a project. A legislative campaign is a project — stakeholders, a hard deadline you do not control, a scope that shifts under you, a coalition that has to be kept aligned. A product launch in a new market is a project. A consulting engagement is a project. I have been running projects the entire time. I just kept describing them in the vocabulary of whatever industry I happened to be standing in, which meant every move looked like starting over.

The frustrating part is that my Master of Science in Information Systems program focused on project management in the tech industry. Scope, schedule, risk, stakeholder management, governance — it was in nearly every course not devoted to software or AI. I moved through it thinking of project management as the scaffolding around the interesting material rather than as the material itself. I wish I had seen it at the time. But I did the work, and the takeaways are still mine, and I am putting them to use now instead of mourning the time I spent not noticing.

A container still needs contents

I want to be precise here, because "I am a project manager" on its own is just a different kind of vague.

The discipline is portable. That is the entire point. But portable does not mean directionless, and I am not interested in being a generalist who will run anything for anyone. So the second half of the decision matters as much as the first.

Everything I build from here is aimed at the ocean. Maritime. Exploration, expeditions, travel, adventure. Those are not hobbies I am trying to bolt onto a career. They are the only things I have consistently oriented my life around, through every version of my professional identity, and they are the environments where I am willing to do hard work for a long time without needing to be talked into it. I have commercial fished; I have run kayak and sailing expeditions; I have run harbors as a boat maintenance diver. I am at home in, on, and around the ocean.

Maritime operations, logistics, and shipbuilding are where the near-term roles are. Expedition and voyage operations are where I want to end up. And somewhere out past that is a circumnavigation, which I have been quietly building toward and which is the honest reason for this particular direction and not some other one.

What I am actually doing about it

Talk is the cheap part of a pivot, so:

I am building the portfolio around the discipline rather than around my personality. The first piece is a complete project plan for a research expedition — charter, work breakdown structure, schedule, risk register, procurement approach, communications matrix, closeout. A documented dry run. It generates no certification hours, and no one is paying me for it. That is fine. It exists to show how I think, how I structure ambiguity, and what I do with a problem before anyone tells me the answer.

After that, the real thing. Shore-side coordination on an actual delivery, where the schedule slips because of weather and the risk register stops being an academic exercise.

I am not rebranding. Rebranding is what I was doing for two years with the list of invented titles. This is narrower, less clever, and considerably more useful: one discipline, one direction, and work that proves it instead of language that describes it.

The hat fits. I am going to go wear it somewhere wet.