The Experience on Your Resume Isn't Your Most Valuable One
Photo by Nadine Marfurt.
What's the worst job you ever had? Mine started when I was eight years old.
My mom decided to open a commercial kitchen cleaning business because being a seamstress in NYC's garment district wasn't paying the bills. Her business consumed me. I worked 6-8 hours a day. The rest was school, homework, studying for exams, SAT prep. I couldn't quit. Couldn't get away. Didn't get paid. It wasn't a job I chose — it was one I dreaded but had to do as the first-gen eldest child while my brother got to play with toys and collect Pokémon cards.
This week, I was back home taking care of my elderly mom, who is recovering from an illness. She needed more support than ever. And as many Asian immigrants know, work is part of their identity — especially for that elder generation. So while she was recovering, I was fielding calls, scheduling clients, texting her employees. Using all my language skills I haven't had to use on a daily basis in the Bay Area. Cantonese. Mandarin. Spanish.
The Work You Didn't Choose Still Shaped You
By the time I got to college, I had about 10 years of experience running a blue-collar business. No one framed it that way at the time. It just felt like chores that kids do at home. Except it wasn't.
I had spent a decade learning how to code-switch in real time across language, culture, and professional context without losing the thread. How to manage relationships with clients who didn't always see my mom as an equal, and still get the work done. How to read a room, a tone, a silence. How to hold responsibility before I understood what responsibility was.
Sound familiar? Maybe yours didn't look like a commercial kitchen. Maybe it was caregiving. Translating for your parents at the doctor's office. Running your family's finances at 15. Working a job you were ashamed to put on your resume. The work that happened before anyone was watching — or counting.
That work didn't disappear. It's in how you lead right now.
Here's What That Has to Do With Leadership
We have a narrow idea of what counts as experience. The nonprofit sector in particular loves credentials. Degrees, certifications, titles from recognizable institutions. We say we value "lived experience" — and then we build job descriptions that filter it out.
Sure, I have two Ivy League degrees and two master's degrees. But the most valuable skills I rely on in nonprofit consulting — moving between worlds, holding complexity without flinching, communicating across difference — none of that came from a classroom. It came from a commercial kitchen. From being eight years old and the only one in the room who learned how to speak multiple languages and navigate politics.
Here's what we miss when we center credentials:
The first-gen kid managing a family business at 8 understands operations, client management, and multilingual communication — without an MBA.
The woman who spent years navigating family caregiving while working understands capacity constraints, emotional labor, and real-time triage — better than most leadership coaches.
The immigrant who had to translate — literally and culturally — across multiple contexts understands code-switching, power dynamics, and the cost of being misunderstood in ways that no DEI training will ever fully capture.
Lived experience isn't a supplement to leadership capacity. For a lot of us, it is the leadership capacity.
What We Owe the Work We Didn't Choose
Here's the complicated part. I didn't choose that job. I don't romanticize it. There was real cost — lost time, lost childhood freedom, pressure that no eight-year-old should carry.
And also: it made me. Maybe it made you too. The sector needs to grapple with that paradox. Not to celebrate exploitation. But to stop pretending that the most important leadership development only happens in conference rooms and cohorts.
Sometimes it happens in a commercial kitchen at 2am. Sometimes it happens at a mom's bedside while you're still trying to run a business. Sometimes it's the work no one saw that built everything.
🔥 Firebrand Challenge
This week, audit the experience you actually have — not the experience your resume says you have. Go back before the titles and the fellowships. What did you learn from the jobs you didn't choose? What's the work you did before anyone called it experience? The job you couldn't quit, the role you didn't choose, the skills you built before you knew they were skills. Where did you actually learn to do what you do?
Then ask yourself: Is your organization creating conditions where that kind of experience is recognized — or still invisible? Because a lot of your best leaders aren't hiding in the applicant pool. They're hiding in plain sight, doing work the sector hasn't learned to see yet.