People often ask me for quick hit advice on how to get ahead in their company. They ask me because I have a decent track record.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, which is almost worthless except for the fact that you can often attach “English” or “Communications” to the subtext of the degree.

So, after graduating college, I started off pretty much where everyone else did: responding to job ads in the paper and taking an entry-level position.

I started off on the phones, talking to hospitals and doctors’ offices about their healthcare claims. I eventually worked my way up to claims adjuster and then something very strange happened. The company I was working for began rolling out a new claims processing and payment system.

The old system had been in operation for about ten years and was working well but the company was looking to significantly expand their presence in the national health administration market and therefore had to upgrade to a more robust software package.

I started in July of 2000 and they began rolling out the new platform in the summer of 2001; in fact, I was in training for the system on 9/11 and heard about what was happening well after the fact.

What happened when they began rolling out the new system was akin to a corporate frontline coup of the noobies over the operational experts. See, these operational experts were people who had become experts working on the system for the past ten years and when the new system was being gradually rolled out, they were needed on the phones to make sure the transition was smooth. It made no sense to send operational experts into training for a new system and leave the noobie scrubs on the old system–you would then have set loose two groups of amateurs onto your client base. It made much more sense from a Risk Mangement point of view, to keep your operational experts on the phones and processing and adjusting claims on the old system and train the noobies who weren’t wedded to the old system and could then help transition the old experts to the new system.

So what happened is that I effectively blew past the operational experts on the older system and once that happened, the addition of my degree launched me far beyond what I would have been able to achieve had this event not taken place.

As a result, I effectively doubled my salary in only three years through four promotions. Not bad.

And what I learned from this was that I could never marry myself to a system or particular process of doing things because these things always change. Rather, I began focusing on learning the raw business analysis and leadership skills that would allow me to become a versatile commodity, valuable in almost any business venture.

Now I have left the health insurance industry (thank [Enter Chosen Metaphor Here]) but my hard work and careful study of business practices and skills proved invaluable in allowing be a mostly smooth transition into a field completely unrelated to health care for relatively same pay.

Take my advice, don’t stake your success on becoming expert on any particular caveat of a system or as a guardian of a some stupid business practice or protocol because eventually you will become worthless as that practice, protocol, or system gets put to pasture.

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