Revisiting my time at Portland General Electric reminded me that career growth is sometimes about recognizing capabilities you were already building.
Looking Back During a Career Transition
Like a lot of people navigating a challenging job market, I have spent more time recently looking backward as I think about what comes next.
That has meant reopening old presentations, project plans, strategy documents, and reports I had not looked at in years.
I realized I had been underselling some of my earlier work.
My time at Portland General Electric is the clearest example.
For years, I framed that chapter primarily as corporate affairs and community engagement. Those labels were accurate, but they did not fully capture the scope of the work.
Looking back at the projects themselves, I can see that much of what I was doing was really about a broader management challenge:
How does a large, regulated organization translate policy, stakeholder expectations, data, and strategy into systems that people can execute?
I Was New to Corporate, Not New to Solving Problems
Before joining PGE, I had spent more than a decade working primarily in nonprofit and community-based organizations.
Those environments teach you to solve problems with whatever resources you have.
In nonprofit work, I had already spent years building programs, managing people and budgets, working across organizations, creating processes, and solving ambiguous problems. I did not necessarily think of those as distinct leadership capabilities. They were simply part of the job.
When I joined PGE, I was already used to bringing people together, creating structure around messy problems, and figuring out how to measure whether something was working. I just did not yet think of those things as governance, KPI development, or enterprise strategy.
Because much of the work felt natural to me, I did not always recognize its level or complexity.
That is one of the things I understand differently now.
The Smart Grid Assignment That Started It
One of my primary assignments at PGE involved the company’s Smart Grid Test Bed, an initiative with direct Oregon Public Utility Commission oversight.
I was not responsible for engineering the grid technology. My work sat at the intersection of the program, the regulatory environment, customers, community stakeholders, and the organization itself.
I worked with a small team to help develop and execute the project’s strategic community engagement approach, and I led much of the work within the Hillsboro test area.
That meant building relationships with public agencies and community organizations, working with a community advisory structure, translating a complex utility initiative for different audiences, and helping PGE meet commitments associated with the regulatory process.
The experience changed the way I thought about engagement.
It is most useful when it happens early enough to shape the work – not just explain a decision after the fact. It can surface risks, challenge assumptions, and reveal gaps in what an organization knows.
How well do we understand the customers and communities affected by our decisions?
That question eventually became a much larger piece of work.
When an Engagement Problem Became a Data Problem
As I looked more closely at the information behind our engagement work, I started asking different questions: Who were we reaching? Who were we missing? And what did we know about factors like income, energy burden, language, housing, and program participation?
At the same time, Oregon regulators were putting more attention on affordability, energy burden, climate impacts, and underserved communities.
That changed the nature of the problem. We needed better definitions, more consistent data, and clearer measures to understand customer impacts and program performance.
I became the lead on an internal initiative focused on that work, bringing together teams across customer operations, analytics, insights, compliance, and other functions.
The goal was not simply to collect more data. It was to give the organization a better way to understand where the gaps were, whether programs were reaching the people they were intended to serve, and what leadership needed to see to measure progress.
That is the point where I can now see the work moving from engagement into strategy, governance, and performance management.
Using My MBA to Design the Solution
At the same time, I was completing my MBA at Willamette University.
Instead of creating a hypothetical final project, I used the live business problem I was working on at PGE.
My integrative project examined the external regulatory environment, the business need, stakeholder structure, resource requirements, change-management approach, success measures, and technology required to make the effort sustainable.
I proposed a repeatable reporting process, common definitions, agreed-upon metrics, and a dashboard that could help leadership monitor progress.
What I value most about that experience now is the way it shaped how I approach complex problems: understand the policy environment, define the organizational problem clearly, bring the right functions together, identify what information is missing, agree on definitions and measures, build enough structure to keep the work moving, and advise executive leadership.
From Project Work to Executive Portfolio Governance
My PGE work eventually expanded beyond the original data initiative into a broader, multi-year portfolio sponsored by executive leadership. Much of my contribution focused on community engagement and data, but the work also required translating priorities into initiatives, milestones, KPIs, and recurring performance reporting.
At the time, I would not have called what I was doing “portfolio governance” or “enterprise performance management.” I was focused on making sure the work had clear ownership, measurable progress, and that executive leadership had the tools and guidance to meet corporate imperatives.
I also saw the work become more closely connected to broader corporate priorities and accountability. I would never claim that I drove that shift on my own – work at that scale is always collective – but I can see more clearly now how my contributions helped support it.
What Résumé Compression Erased
There is another reason I lost sight of some of this work. Over the years, I followed the same résumé advice many professionals hear: shorten the bullets, narrow the detail, and make the experience easier to scan.
That advice is often useful, but there is a downside if you compress the work before you fully understand what it demonstrates.
A complicated initiative can eventually become a line like:
“Led demographic data initiative that informed customer engagement.”
Accurate, but incomplete.
It leaves out the regulatory context, cross-functional leadership, metrics, strategy, and the executive visibility that made the work more significant.
I was describing what I did, but not the problem I had learned to solve.
That realization has changed how I look at the rest of my career.
What I Understand Differently Now
Looking back, I no longer see my nonprofit experience, my time at PGE, my work in technology and broadband, and my current public-service work as disconnected chapters.
There is a consistent thread.
My nonprofit years taught me how to build systems with limited resources, create partnerships, navigate different institutions, and move people toward shared outcomes.
PGE allowed me to refine those abilities inside a large, regulated enterprise.
Intel gave me the opportunity to see how those capabilities translated into the semiconductor industry. Washington County added the perspective of public-sector infrastructure, funding, and implementation.
Serving in elected office has added the perspective of governance – evaluating infrastructure, policy, budgets, growth, and public expectations from the decision-making side of the table.
The settings changed, but the underlying work did not change as much as I once thought.
Much of my career has involved connecting things organizations often manage separately: policy and operations, data and decisions, external stakeholders and internal teams, strategy and execution, and infrastructure investment and public trust.
Career growth is not always about adding another skill or credential. Sometimes it is about finally having the language to recognize what you already know how to do.
The question I am asking myself now is not:
“What else do I need to add?”
It is:
“What have I already learned to do that I have not been explaining clearly enough?”