“Wait for the right opportunity” is familiar career advice. It sounds patient, prudent and reassuringly professional. It can also leave talented people sitting politely beside their ambitions while waiting for an organizational system — one not particularly famous for speed — to notice them.
Promotions, special assignments and leadership roles rarely arrive according to a carefully designed career timetable. Priorities change. Budgets shift. Positions are restructured, frozen or eliminated. Leaders rotate. The opportunity someone informally suggested might be coming can disappear into the mysterious administrative ecosystem where promising ideas and unanswered emails occasionally go to rest.
Waiting, therefore, is not a strategy.
That does not mean forcing your way into every visible initiative or treating each meeting as an audition. It means deliberately building the capability, credibility and evidence that make you ready when an opportunity appears and capable of creating one when it does not.
Think Beyond the Résumé
A résumé documents where you have been. A career portfolio demonstrates the value you are prepared to create next.
That portfolio is not necessarily a physical document. It is the accumulated evidence of your mission results, leadership judgment, enterprise relationships and ability to perform under complex conditions. It answers the executive question that job titles and years of service cannot answer by themselves, What suggests this person can succeed at a higher level of responsibility?
Technical competence remains essential, but it is rarely sufficient. OPM’s Executive Core Qualifications emphasize capabilities such as problem-solving, agility, developing others, innovation, strategic thinking and achieving results. Leadership readiness is demonstrated when those capabilities are applied, not when they are added to a development plan and revisited during next year’s performance discussion.
The strongest candidates can identify specific moments when they brought clarity to ambiguity, aligned competing stakeholders, improved an outcome, challenged an outdated assumption or helped others succeed. They do not merely announce that they are strategic thinkers. They provide evidence that strategic thinking changed something.
Choose Stretch Work Strategically
Creating opportunity does not mean volunteering for everything. Constant availability can make you indispensable in your current role while doing surprisingly little to prepare you for the next one.
Activity is not advancement. Exhaustion is not executive presence.
The most useful stretch assignments close a meaningful gap between the experience you have and the experience required at the next level. Look at the leaders whose responsibilities resemble those you hope to assume. What decisions do they make? Which stakeholders must they influence? What risks are they expected to manage? Where must they operate without perfect information?
Then examine your own portfolio honestly. The missing experience, not the most comfortable assignment, should guide your next move.
Perhaps you need to lead across organizational boundaries, brief senior decision-makers, manage a politically sensitive issue, guide a team through change or turn an underperforming process around. Seek work that gives you that exposure while addressing a genuine mission need.
The goal is not visibility for its own sake. Organizations already have enough people who are highly visible while producing remarkably little movement. The goal is visible value, a contribution that solves a problem, strengthens the mission and demonstrates readiness for broader responsibility.
Make Your Growth Useful to the Mission
The most compelling development opportunities solve two problems at once, an organizational need and a personal capability gap.
Instead of asking only, “What training should I take?” ask, “What mission challenge would allow me to learn, apply and demonstrate the capability I need?”
Training has value, but course completion is not the same as capability. A certificate confirms that you attended. Results show that you can perform.
This shift also creates a stronger conversation with your supervisor. You are not asking someone to manufacture a special opportunity solely for your benefit. You are proposing a practical way to address a mission challenge while expanding organizational capacity. That is a much easier proposition for a leader to support, and a much stronger example for you to carry forward.
Executives can reinforce this approach by making developmental work consequential rather than ceremonial. Assign emerging leaders to real problems. Give them appropriate decision space. Provide access to stakeholders and candid feedback. Then evaluate both the outcome and the judgment demonstrated along the way.
The One Thing to Do Tomorrow
Create a simple opportunity map with three elements, a mission problem that needs attention, a capability you need to strengthen and a contribution you could make within the next 30 days.
Select the strongest intersection and take it to your supervisor as a proposal, not merely a request.
Your next opportunity may not begin with a vacancy announcement, a formal program or an invitation from senior leadership. It may begin when you notice an unresolved problem, step forward with a credible response and demonstrate that you are already thinking beyond the boundaries of your current position.
Careers are influenced by timing, but they should not be surrendered to it. Stop waiting for the opportunity to arrive fully formed.
Build the evidence that you are ready. Then help create the work that proves it.
Dr. Rhonda Farrell is a transformation advisor with decades of experience driving impactful change and strategic growth for DoD, IC, Joint, and commercial agencies and organizations. She has a robust background in digital transformation, organizational development, and process improvement, offering a unique perspective that combines technical expertise with a deep understanding of business dynamics. As a strategy and innovation leader, she aligns with CIO, CTO, CDO, CISO, and Chief of Staff initiatives to identify strategic gaps, realign missions, and re-engineer organizations. Based in Baltimore and a proud US Marine Corps veteran, she brings a disciplined, resilient, and mission-focused approach to her work, enabling organizations to pivot and innovate successfully.
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