People Look for Roles, Companies Look for Competencies: A Conversation with Sylwia Masłowska

Most career advice tells you to climb. Find the next title, then the title above that, and keep going until the ladder runs out. Sylwia Masłowska has spent two decades proving the ladder was never the point.

She started in corporate, at Thomson Reuters and then BNP Paribas, doing her master's over the weekends while already working. She grew fast, ran operations teams, managed a division doing tens of millions in revenue, and got to the near-top of the operations office in Poland. Then she left it all for tech, moving through Netguru and 10Clouds and Polcode, and eventually co-founded Shift and Pause, a consultancy that helps people and companies navigate career transitions and hiring. She speaks five languages. And her whole story is an argument against the straight line everyone assumes a career is supposed to be.

Corporate was a great start, until the ladder narrowed

Sylwia is careful not to trash the corporate years. They were, she says, a great place to start. The world was opening back offices in Poland, and what those companies wanted wasn't deep experience but international education and languages, which she had. She grew quickly into leadership.

But there's a level where the ladder starts to narrow, and where growth becomes possible but much harder. More than that, she watched decisions crawl through layers of approvals, politics, and people in Luxembourg and France she had no direct relationship with. The momentum you could feel in a fast-moving company just wasn't there. So she made what she calls a strategic move, not a light one: try something more dynamic, knowing that corporate was muscle memory she could always return to if tech didn't work out.

The single biggest difference: the pace of decisions

Ask her what actually separates corporate from startups and the answer is immediate. It's the pace of decision-making. Flatter structures, more empowerment, higher visibility on everything happening in the company, so you can connect the dots and move. In the corporate world you can miss the entire moment simply because of how many approvals it takes to act.

The pivot mistake almost everyone makes

This is the line from the episode I keep coming back to. When people try to change careers, they look for roles. Companies look for competencies. Flip that around and everything changes.

Most people hunting for a change look for the next title up. Account manager to client partner to team leader. But whether you want to grow in your lane or jump lanes entirely, the thing to focus on is your competencies and how they transfer. An account manager wasn't really "doing account management." They were building relationships, negotiating deals, managing contracts. Once you list what you actually did and what you're actually good at, the range of roles you could credibly move into is enormous.

Her own move proves it. She didn't enter tech through the same title she'd held. She doubled down on what she knew, finance and clients, and joined a product company focused specifically on finance, where she could transfer the one skill she was certain of, talking to those customers, while learning the product side on the job.

How to get past employers who only see titles

I pushed her on the obvious objection. Plenty of employers, and plenty of applicant tracking systems, will zero you out the moment your title history doesn't match. How do you get through that?

Two things. The market is shifting, slowly. She's been contacted by headhunters for roles well off her natural path, precisely because someone decided her skills were transferable, and that mindset is spreading, though it may take years to become the norm. In the meantime, the whole game is landing the first interview. The first pass is done by a system, not a person, so you have to present your skills and competencies on paper in a way that matches the scoring. Once you're actually in the room, the title stops mattering and how you carry yourself takes over. But you don't apply to a hundred jobs in the dark. You decide what you want to do next, then shape how you present your profile toward that.

On fractional leadership: it depends, and verify the practice

The fractional executive trend? A very political "it depends." She thinks it's genuinely useful, especially for smaller companies that don't need to grow overhead to get senior expertise, and the market is growing something like 20% a year. But because it's trendy, it's getting crowded with people who lack the practical experience to do it. A fractional executive role is broader than a scoped consulting project, so it demands someone who has actually done the thing many times. Her advice to companies is blunt: verify the practical experience before you hire. And she expects the specialization to keep narrowing, from "fractional CRO" to "fractional CRO for a product company doing X."

The unglamorous truth about a big revenue number

Running a division doing tens of millions sounds glamorous. The unglamorous reality, she says, has nothing to do with the number. It's that you're constantly balancing conflicting interests, and your own interest often isn't the one that should win. Client expectations, business expectations, your team's emotions and ambitions, other players across the company, everyone rowing toward the same shore but with genuinely conflicting means. And the harder truth underneath: in most senior roles the results of your work don't show up day to day. You pour in time and energy building a customer base or running sales, and it takes a long time to see the fruit. The glamorous-sounding part is actually the discipline of continuing to believe you're doing a good job before the evidence arrives.

Slides versus reality

What separates a strategy that works on slides from one that works in life? A real strategy survives the unforeseen. You can only anticipate so many risks on paper. If your plan collapses the first time something you didn't predict hits it, or if you can't park the long-term work to deal with an urgent moment and then resume the path, then it was never a strategy. It was a set of short-term wins dressed up. And short-term wins aren't sustainable unless you can make them repeatable and build a long-term plan around what you're actually good at.

The overachiever wall

The pattern she sees most in people who come to Shift and Pause burnt out is a generation of overachievers hitting a wall. Millennials and the surrounding cohort were taught, by watching their parents, that the harder you work the more you achieve. It ties directly back to the lesson she learned herself: it's not about working the hardest, it's about working smart. You cannot be the person who solves everything and carries everything indefinitely. And becoming a leader means accepting you're not the smartest person in the room, that your job is to ask better questions and give people the ownership to grow, even when that means letting them fail sometimes.

The metric people overvalue

Growth over retention. After the COVID peak deflated, companies fixated on new logos, measuring everything through leads closed and businesses won. But retaining and expanding existing customers usually delivers a higher return than chasing new ones. Sometimes a customer needs to scale down, not up, and how you handle that relationship is your actual way forward. Too many companies forgot this while running after new business.

Key takeaways

Careers aren't ladders. You move around, not just up. Chase competencies, not the next title.

People look for roles, companies look for competencies. Reverse your own thinking and the range of moves open to you expands dramatically.

Land the first interview. The first filter is a system. Present your skills on paper to match the scoring, then let the room do the rest.

Strategy is what survives the unforeseen. If your plan dies on first contact with reality, it was short-term wins in disguise.

Don't overvalue growth over retention. Keeping and expanding customers usually beats chasing new logos.

Frameworks worth stealing

Competency mapping before the job hunt

Before you apply anywhere, stop looking at titles. Write down what you actually did in each role, the underlying skills, relationships, negotiation, organizing complex work, and what you're genuinely good at. Then decide the direction you want, and shape your profile toward it. You're not shooting in the dark across a hundred applications. You're transferring proven competencies into a deliberate next step.

Verify the practice before you hire fractional

When bringing in a fractional executive, remember the role is broad, not a scoped project. Demand evidence they've actually done it, many times, before. Trendiness has crowded the space with people who lack the practical reps, and a business-level mandate is the wrong place to find that out late.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

People usually look for the roles, not competencies, and companies look for competencies, not roles.

It's not about working the hardest, but working in a smart way that matters.

If your strategy cannot survive the unforeseen, it wasn't a strategy.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? That the work matters, but you're not running an ER or an open-heart surgery. A wrong decision today can be fixed tomorrow, so in many cases it's better to decide and test than to freeze. She has no patience for leaders who treat business as war and invent fake scenarios to keep their people on edge. We all have lives. There's almost always a way to fix things or find a way around.

Advice you wish you'd listened to? The same one. She burned out and learned the hard way that investing too much of herself wasn't the way forward. She'd heard the advice earlier; she just had to apply it herself before it took.

What would you tell your younger self? You've got this, you can do it. For all the confidence she projects about switching careers and moving between businesses, she had her own moments of doubt and walls she didn't know how to get past. She'd tell her younger self they'd pass.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? How to keep a business relevant as the market keeps changing, holding onto what the business is at its core while staying responsive to conditions that won't sit still.

Favorite spot? House, an Asian spot in the Tri-City area with very good curry. She's a fan of Thai cuisine.

Tool you can't live without? AI, ChatGPT specifically, which she calls a game changer if you treat it as a benefit rather than a replacement. Though her honest answer was simpler: her phone.

---

Sylwia Masłowska is a co-founder of Shift and Pause, a consultancy focused on career transitions and hiring, built alongside her longtime colleague and friend. Over two decades she has moved from Thomson Reuters and BNP Paribas into tech at Netguru, 10Clouds, and Polcode, scaling teams and running large revenue divisions along the way.