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How To Get The Experience (Before You Get The Job)
October 15, 2021
Every capstone project is more than just a final assignment — it’s your chance to showcase real impact and highlight how you solved real problems. In this article, I break down how to turn your work into a compelling narrative, emphasize measurable results, and position your capstone as evidence of your skills (not just another school requirement).
If you’ve come this far, you’ve likely already taken a number of steps to significantly improve your life. You’ve made the decision to educate yourself and learn a new discipline. You’ve challenged yourself to meet people in your industry and maybe even made a few great connections. You may have even found some great opportunities to start testing your skills in the real world. These steps together build the virtuous cycle of a highly energetic non-traditional career path.
But for anyone who has gone through this cycle, you’ll notice that there seems to be a certain amount of ‘slippage’ when it comes to your efforts. Educational changes will go unnoticed by your industry. Networking meetings that seem great don’t produce enough value. Opportunites, where you demonstrated massive improvement and value to your new market, will largely go unnoticed.
Sometimes this is due to bad timing or choosing the wrong area of focus. That’s a natural risk we all take when attempting something new. But sometimes you KNOW, in your gut, that what you’re working on is valuable, that you’re doing something important, it’s just not getting the attention it deserves. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that while we’ve found a way to get ourselves moving and turning effort into personal wins, we haven’t thought through how others will see these changes and incorporate them into their lives. While you’re going through arguably one of the most important changes in your life, everyone you want to ultimately impact is living their life as usual. Unless something is immediately useful, impactful, and eye-catching, most people are not going to see the nuance of your efforts.
This is where understanding how to capstone your achievements come in. Capstoning is the practice of taking your personal effort in your disciplines (education, networking, and opportunity) and translating those outputs into easily sharable data. A great capstone is designed specifically for the audience you have in mind, created in such a way that the people who are in your industry will pay attention to your efforts. This requires another level of effort, a level most people don’t take. But the reward for putting in the time and (often) courage to get your message out there is having a medium that people will be able to connect with weeks, months, or even years after you’ve moved on. Once you’ve found a mechanism to find your opportunity in the world, this is one of the highest impact areas you can focus on.
In this article, I’ll go into how you can create a capstone strategy for yourself, and then give specific examples of some of the most common capstone vehicles. By the end, you should have a great idea about how to start formulating a strategy to translate your hard work into an effective message for your audience.
Every endeavor, no matter what your goal, will eventually interact with another human being. And they’re not super interested in your problems, they got their own to worry about! But if you’re going to make traction with your work, you need to understand their problems and get an idea of what sort of messages will stick with them.
In this step, ask yourself: who exactly is the most important group of people for you to ultimately be interacting with? If your ultimate goal is to get a job as a Data Scientist, you’re going to want to interact specifically with people who hire Data Scientists. This can be anyone from recruiters, hiring managers, and even the Data Scientists who recommend jobs to their company. Even if your goal is very singular, there is likely a large list of people who will be able to help you on your journey.
Once you’ve identified a group of people you want to interact with, pick just one group you wish to focus on. Then for this group, we’re going to brainstorm. Grab a piece of paper and write down three sections: Pains, Gains, and Jobs1. From here, you will then brainstorm on the following four questions:
Once you’ve completed this activity and feel you can really empathize with your target audience, it’s time to validate your understanding. Reach out and have an informational interview with at least one person you want to connect with your target audience. Nothing beats direct information, and a conversation will either validate or conflict with what you believe to be true, creating more certainty in your direction. Create a cold email2 to one of the folks you’ve already been researching and ask for 30 minutes of their time. Then, prepare a list of questions you most want to have answered and effectively use the time.
You may wish to do this with multiple groups if you know there is another target audience you want to connect with. However, try to limit to a maximum of two groups, particularly if this is your first time doing this. We want to be focused and complete this once, rather than trying to be fully comprehensive.
The good news is that the core audience is already responding to messages in the real world. They use social media, receive resumes, attend conferences, reads books and waste time watching TV because they’re normal people just like you. Our job now at this point is to understand which messages your audience responds the best to when trying to solve their problems.
We’re going to do this by doing the following tasks:
By this point, you should have a good idea of the environment your core audience lives in, and start to see what sort of content they respond well to. Here, we’re going to review the list of all of the content and pick one messaging vehicle, as well as one showcase vehicle to focus your energy on. Here’s the difference between those two vehicles and why they’re important:
Messaging and Showcase vehicles often have natural pairings that make them easy to go together. For example, creating great infographics on Instagram to connect with your audience may entice a few to seek out your website (linked in the comments) or see your profile to learn more about you. The infographic is active, your website and profile are passive. A substack article such as this will be active content, but the ‘About Us’ page will be passive.
To get started, pick one active messaging vehicle you’re interested in pursuing, and then choose up to two passive vehicles to incorporate into your search. While you should only focus on one active vehicle, there are often multiple passive vehicles that may be appropriate for your audience depending on your end goal. Becoming great at writing content for LinkedIn is a great active vehicle, but once people go to your LinkedIn profile to learn more about you, you may also want them to see your Resume. Crafting a good LinkedIn profile and Resume can both be effective strategies in pursuing your opportunities.
Finally, after you’ve found the list of tools you have available, it’s time to figure out how best to utilize them to translate your journey into something for a wider, more distant audience. This is your chance to take everything you’ve done and see it through a medium they're able to easily process.
Your job then is to begin to utilize these mediums in an effective manner, learning what the vehicle requires and incorporating it into your processes. This will mean reading on the best practices of your vehicle, and then practicing in a consistent manner so that your content gets better, reaching a wider and wider audience. By learning through practice, you can get good at both actively reaching out to people, and then attracting them to you through your passive vehicles. You can then allow them to see deeper into what you have to offer, and get them to realize you’re somebody worth talking to.
In the next section, I’ll talk about some of the more popular vehicles used by people today, but don’t consider this comprehensive. There are new vehicles being created every day, with big rewards for people who can master new vehicles early (can you imagine your job prospects if you mastered Facebook Marketing in 2009?). That being said, there are some common vehicles that are worth understanding and applying to any capstone strategy.
Ultimately, we want our efforts to go as far as they can. We can accomplish a lot for ourselves by proving we can learn a new skill, reach out to a big connection or take a risk on an exciting opportunity. But these wins will be unfulfilling if they don’t ultimately change the minds of your industry’s players. No one ever wishes to be the greatest player that no one noticed.
This isn’t just a story about your next job or next big payday, but a story about your industry and how your efforts will influence it. We don’t merely wish to enter an industry and quietly sit in a corner, we wish to enter it and become a luminary, a focal point for other’s hopes and ambitions. If we do this well, we can make an impact, inspire people to be more, and extract massive value for ourselves and the people important to us.
Capstoning is the real-world process by which we get others to realize that we are valuable, in a language that others can easily understand and incorporate into their decision-making progress. And that’s how real progress begins to be made.
Brian Schuster is a problem-solver for founders and executives.
