Operations professionals seldom spring up from intentional or calculated educational and work experiences.
While there are "Operations" majors and specific roles that might have helped along the way — most of us arrived here sideways — through a role that kept expanding, a problem that kept sliding into our Slack DMs, a skill set that turned out to be weirdly applicable to something nobody else wanted to do.
Coming from personal experience, that can feel isolating in ways that are hard to explain to people inside and outside of it. You look around at your peers in other functions and they have a language for what they do, a clear professional identity, a body of literature and certification pathways that validates their expertise. Operations often doesn't offer that in the same way. So you can find yourself questioning the very fiber of what you know — wondering if what you're doing is a real discipline or just a collection of things that fell to you because you were good at figuring things out.
I've been there. I'm still there.
But I've started to think about it differently. Because the thing that can make operations feel illegitimate is actually one its greatest strengths.
The fact that ops professionals come from all different sides of a business — often multiple sides, across multiple industries, in the same career — means that the strategies and instincts that make operations special have endless applications. We aren't trained to see one function. We're trained to see how functions connect. That's not a gap in our credentials. That's the credential.
This mindset is relatively new to me, partly because I'm relatively new to operations. I came by way of customer experience before I landed here, and for a while it felt like I was still catching up to people who had been doing "real ops" their whole careers.
What shifted it for me was looking at it through a different lens. My older sister is also in operations — she got here before me, and in a lot of ways it feels like joining a family business and following in her footsteps. But here's the thing: she came from economics. I came from anthropology and psychology. Which means our understanding of operations, our approaches to problems, and the specific abilities we bring to the work are fundamentally different.
Most of the time that makes me feel insecure (thank you childhood trauma), but it should be celebrated.
Not managed. Not reconciled into some unified methodology. Celebrated. Because the ops professional who came up through finance sees risk and structure in a way I don't. The one who came through customer experience — hi — sees the human side of a process in a way a pure analyst might miss. The one who came through marketing understands how to communicate change and build buy-in. We all ended up in the same place. We got here very differently. That diversity of etiology is what makes a strong ops function, whether that's a team of one or a team of twenty.
If you're new to thinking of yourself as an operations professional — if you're still in the phase where you're not quite sure you've earned the title — I'd offer this: the winding road that got you here isn't a liability to explain away. It's the thing that makes you good at this.
You didn't plan to end up in operations. Neither did most of us. We're in good company.