Arguably, I have spent many years taking my experience for granted.

As I set out into the world of contracting this year, I have found myself in the interesting postion of suddenly and very quickly needing to do a lot of professional self-reflection and inventory work. Specificially, I’ve needed to spend a couple weeks digging through my decades of experience and compiling a professional portfolio for submissions.

Logistically this has been tough because as an employee of any organization one does not routinely stop to do the two things one needs to do in order to compile a well-designed and robust portfolio. One does not routinely stop in the middle of work, lift oneself up to the metaphorical fifty-thousand foot view, and evaluate ones role in that moment. Also, and ethically, one does not take screenshots of work in progress and save them as a kind of professional photo album of one’s adventures through a business process.

In other words, not only did I need to think creatively about demonstrating examples of the same without access to years worth of files and screenshots, I also had to sit down and open my mental memory banks up to those days spent doing in-the-weeds collaboration and organizing user research sessions and aggregating workshop data, and then put it all into a kind of logical and reflective inventory of all those years of experience I had previously taken for granted.

And now that I’ve done it, I think I’d decided my next important step on this contracting journey: I need to go back into those memory banks and take better care of those experiences. Curate. Hone. Highlight. And cherish. Letting that stuff gather dust was possibly not my smartest move.