Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / How Skill Liquidity Transforms Your Career Options
Transcript
- Lucas: You know the phrase 'liquidity' in finance — how easily an asset can be turned into cash without losing value. Luna: Right. Cash itself is perfectly liquid. A bespoke piece of industrial machinery — not so much. Lucas: I've been thinking about that same idea applied to skills. What if we asked: how liquid is a particular skill? How easily can it move across roles, industries, or pay bands? Luna: So a skill that's highly liquid — you could take it from one job and plug it into a completely different one and it still creates value. Lucas: Exactly. And a skill that's illiquid — it's so tied to a specific context that it loses almost all its value the moment you leave that role. I think this lens explains a lot about why some people pivot effortlessly and others feel stuck. Luna: Give me an example of a highly liquid skill. Lucas: Process mapping. If you've ever documented a workflow — whether it's in a factory, a hospital, or a software team — you can do that in almost any industry. The fundamental skill of 'drawing the steps, finding the bottlenecks, designing a better flow' travels. It's almost perfectly portable. Luna: And an illiquid one? Lucas: Knowing the exact part number for a specific valve used in a specific oil refinery. That knowledge is valuable at that refinery. It's close to worthless if you move to, say, a marketing agency. Luna: Okay, but most skills fall somewhere in the middle. So how do you measure liquidity? Lucas: I'd break it into three dimensions. First: portability — how many industries or roles can use this skill? Second: convertibility — how quickly can you turn that skill into income without retraining? Third: scalability — does the skill let you earn more as you get better, or does it cap out? Luna: So a skill like sales — high portability, high convertibility, medium scalability. A skill like neurosurgery — low portability, high convertibility, high scalability. Lucas: Exactly right. And the interesting part is that most people never consciously audit the liquidity of their own skill set. They just accumulate whatever their current job requires. Then they wonder why it's hard to make a move. Luna: Let's ground this in a real story. Who's someone you've seen navigate this well? Lucas: I was talking to a woman named Priya — she spent about twelve years in supply chain at a large consumer goods company. Procurement, logistics, vendor management. She was good at it, but she wanted to move into fintech. Luna: Supply chain to fintech — that's not an obvious jump. Lucas: No. On paper, her resume said 'supply chain manager.' But when we sat down and mapped her skills, three things jumped out as highly liquid. First: process mapping — she'd redesigned a whole inbound logistics flow. Second: vendor negotiation — she'd managed contracts worth over 50 million dollars annually. Third: data analysis — she'd built dashboards to track supplier performance. Luna: All three of those are high-portability skills. Process mapping, negotiation, data analysis — any tech company needs those. Lucas: Right. But she'd never framed them that way. In her mind, those skills were 'supply chain skills.' They were actually just skills she happened to practice in supply chain. Luna: That's a crucial distinction. So what did she do? Lucas: She spent about six weeks building a portfolio — not a resume, a portfolio — that demonstrated those three skills in action. She wrote one case study on the logistics redesign, one on a vendor negotiation where she saved 4 million dollars, and one on a data dashboard that reduced stockouts by 15 percent. Luna: And then she applied for a product operations role at a fintech company. Lucas: Exactly. Product operations is basically process mapping, vendor management, and data analysis — just applied to software tools instead of shipping containers. She got the job. Her salary increased by about 40 percent. Luna: So she didn't learn a bunch of new skills. She just relabeled and repackaged the high-liquidity ones she already had. Lucas: That's the whole thesis. The highest-leverage career move isn't always learning something new. Sometimes it's recognizing which of your existing skills are liquid and finding a market that values them more. Luna: This is actually a great moment to mention something. If this show has helped you think through a career decision or reframe how you see your own skills, we keep it going because listeners like you support it. Lucas: Yeah. No ads, no sponsors — just a small community of people who find these conversations useful. If that's you, you can help at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: And it genuinely makes a difference. A couple of dollars a month keeps the podcast independent and lets us spend time on episodes like this one. Lucas: Alright — back to the liquidity idea. So Priya's story is a great example of convertibility. She turned her existing skills into income in a new industry within about two months. But there's another dimension I want to dig into: scalability. Luna: Which skills scale best? Lucas: Skills where your output isn't limited by your time. Writing code scales because you write it once and it runs a million times. Selling software — less scalable, because each deal takes time. But negotiation itself can scale if you train others to do it. Luna: So when you're evaluating a skill's liquidity, you want to ask: can I do this in multiple contexts, can I get paid for it quickly, and can I increase my earning power without just working more hours? Lucas: That's a perfect summary. And I think the most overlooked dimension is portability. People stay in industries too long because they think their skills are industry-specific. But most skills are actually more portable than people realize. Luna: What's a skill that seems illiquid but actually isn't? Lucas: Regulatory compliance. On the surface, it seems tied to a specific industry — healthcare regulations, financial regulations, whatever. But the underlying skill is: 'read complex rules, interpret how they apply to a business operation, and design processes to stay within them.' That skill is valuable in any regulated industry. And almost every industry is regulated in some way. Luna: So a compliance officer in banking could move to cannabis or drones or AI — and their skill would still be valuable. Lucas: Exactly. The subject matter is different, but the core skill transfers. The challenge is that most compliance officers describe themselves as 'a banking regulator' instead of 'someone who helps organizations navigate complex regulatory environments.' That self-label is what kills liquidity. Luna: Okay, so let's give listeners a practical exercise. How do they audit their own skill liquidity this week? Lucas: Three steps. Step one: list every task you did last week. Don't filter — just dump them. Step two: for each task, strip away the industry context. Ask: if I did this exact activity in a different industry, what would it be called? Step three: rank each skill on a scale of 1 to 5 for portability, convertibility, and scalability. Luna: And then look for the ones that scored high across all three — those are your most liquid skills. Lucas: Right. And the ones that score low — don't abandon them, but be aware that they're tying you to your current context. If you want flexibility, you might want to invest in building a more liquid skill alongside them. Luna: I tried this exercise myself last year. I discovered that my skill of 'asking good questions in interviews' is actually a form of research synthesis. And that skill is highly portable across any content-based role. Lucas: Did that change anything about how you work? Luna: It made me more intentional about documenting my process. I started keeping a small log of the questions I asked and what I learned from them. Now I can show that as a portfolio piece if I ever want to shift. Lucas: That's exactly the point. The exercise itself builds liquidity because you start seeing your skills as independent assets rather than just parts of your job. Luna: One thing I want to push back on slightly. Isn't there a risk of over-generalizing? If everybody just focuses on liquid skills, do we lose deep expertise? Lucas: That's a fair critique. Deep expertise is valuable and it's often illiquid by nature. The person who knows the exact valve part number — that knowledge is irreplaceable at that refinery. But the problem is when people have only illiquid skills and no liquid ones. They become trapped. Luna: So the ideal is a mix. A core of deep, specialized, illiquid expertise that makes you valuable in your current role — plus a set of liquid skills that give you options. Lucas: Exactly. And the liquid skills don't have to be your main thing. They can be secondary skills that you maintain at a conversational level. Just enough that you could use them to pivot if needed. Luna: Let me ask you this: how does someone identify which liquid skills to invest in? There are hundreds of possibilities. Lucas: I think the smartest approach is to look at job postings in the industry you might want to move into. Find the skills that appear across many different roles — those are the liquid ones in that market. Then check if you already have any version of them. Luna: So it's a two-way match. What the market demands and what you already own. Lucas: Right. And often you'll find that you have a version of a skill that's just labeled differently. Priya had negotiation experience from supply chain — but negotiation is negotiation, whether it's about container shipping rates or software licensing fees. Luna: That's a freeing thought. It means your career options are wider than your resume suggests. Lucas: That's the takeaway I'd want listeners to sit with. Your skills are more portable than you think. The biggest barrier is usually how you describe them. Luna: And once you see them as liquid assets, you start making different decisions about which skills to build and which to keep warm. Lucas: Exactly. That's the shift — from 'I am what my job title says I am' to 'I am a collection of skills with varying degrees of liquidity.' And that second mindset gives you much more control.