From Institutional Identity to Leadership Marketability
By Andrew M. Vasquez, M.P.A.
Founder & Principal Consultant, AMV Consulting
Leadership. Enrollment. Student Success.
Recently, I worked with a senior higher education professional with over 20 years of experience at a flagship R1 institution. On paper, their résumé reflected stability, longevity, and deep institutional knowledge. In practice, they were struggling to translate that experience into upward mobility.
Despite being highly qualified, they felt stuck.
They weren’t failing interviews because they lacked skill. They were stalling because of how they framed their own leadership.
This is a familiar pattern in higher education — and one that often goes unnamed.
The Core Challenge
The issue wasn’t credentials, experience, or ambition.
The challenge was identity.
Years inside a single institution had quietly shaped how this leader:
Described their work
Understated decision-making authority
Framed leadership as “support” rather than ownership
Much of their résumé read as administrative — even though they had routinely performed work that should have sat at the faculty, director, or dean level.
They had solved complex problems, led initiatives, and filled institutional gaps — but described those contributions as routine obligations rather than strategic leadership.
This is not uncommon. In fact, it is one of the most predictable outcomes of long tenure at large, complex institutions.
The Hidden Cost of Institutional Loyalty
Flagship institutions reward reliability, adaptability, and institutional memory. Over time, leaders learn to prioritize continuity over visibility. Work gets done quietly. Credit is shared or diffused. Titles lag behind responsibilities.
What rarely gets discussed is how this environment can erode portability.
When leaders internalize messages like:
“This is just part of the job”
“I don’t want to overstate my role”
“I’ve never held that title”
They unintentionally suppress the very signals external employers look for.
In this case, the leader wasn’t missing experience — they were missing permission to name it.
The Insight
Career stagnation in higher education is often misdiagnosed as a résumé problem.
More often, it’s an identity problem.
This leader had spent decades orienting their professional identity around one institution. Their language, confidence, and self-assessment were shaped by internal norms — not external markets.
The result was a résumé and interview narrative that emphasized effort over impact, contribution over authority, and loyalty over leadership.
None of that reflects a lack of capability. It reflects conditioning.
The Reframe
We shifted the frame in three deliberate ways.
1. From Institutional Loyalty → Leadership Value
Instead of centering their story on where they worked, we centered it on:
Problems they solved
Decisions they owned
Outcomes they influenced
The institution became context — not the headline.
This subtle shift immediately changed how their experience read on paper and how it sounded out loud.
2. From Job Seeker → Value Provider
Rather than approaching the market as someone asking for opportunity, we reframed the posture as:
Here is the leadership capacity I bring. Here is how institutions benefit.
This mindset shift doesn’t just affect confidence — it alters how résumés are structured, how interviews unfold, and how leadership presence is perceived.
The leader stopped positioning themselves as “ready for the next step” and began articulating why the next institution would be better because of them.
3. From Static Résumé → Living Narrative
We treated the résumé not as a historical record, but as a strategic document:
Optimized for applicant tracking systems
Designed for executive readability
Aligned with a coherent interview story
The goal was not embellishment. It was accuracy with confidence.
Equally important, we began reshaping the leader’s internal narrative — the story they tell themselves about their own career — so that interviews would feel less like justification and more like alignment.
Why This Matters (Especially in Higher Ed)
Many capable leaders — particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds — are conditioned early in their careers to:
Be humble
Let work speak for itself
Avoid self-promotion
Unfortunately, modern hiring systems reward clarity, articulation, and strategic framing — not quiet competence.
The result is a leadership bottleneck that has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with translation.
Institutions lose strong leaders not because they lack readiness, but because they were never taught how to narrate their readiness beyond internal walls.
The Takeaway
Career advancement in higher education is rarely blocked by lack of experience.
More often, it is blocked by:
Misaligned identity
Inherited institutional narratives
Outdated assumptions about how leadership is recognized
When leaders learn to translate their work into market language, momentum follows — not because they have changed who they are, but because they have clarified it.
Closing Reflection
If this story resonates, it’s likely not because the situation is rare — but because it’s familiar. Many capable leaders are closer to momentum than they realize; they’re simply carrying an identity that no longer fits the direction they’re trying to go.
Sometimes progress doesn’t begin with a new role or a new title. It begins with a clearer understanding of your value — and the confidence to name it.
Let’s build momentum — together.
