The Person Who Does Great Work Nobody Sees

Pam Paterson tells a story about a colleague named Clint.

Clint was, by every measure that should matter, exceptional. More experienced than Pam. More senior. Smarter even (in Pam’s own words). He had worked on more projects, spent more time in the organization, and by any reasonable assessment deserved more recognition than he was getting.

There was one problem, though: nobody at the top of the organization even knew he existed.

Pam, by contrast, was physically located near the CEOs and VPs. She was visible—not because she was better, but because she was present. One day, in conversation with a senior vice president, she mentioned Clint's name. She watched his face crinkle. "You know Clint, don't you?" she asked. "Oh," he said. "I think so."

That moment stayed with her because of what it revealed. Doing excellent work is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. Visibility is a separate skill, and in most organizations, it’s completely unmanaged.

Visibility Isn't the Same as Being Busy

The shift to remote and hybrid work has made this problem harder to see and easier to ignore. In an office, proximity does some of the work for you—the informal conversation, the face you recognize in a meeting, the colleague who vouches for you because they've watched you work. Online, none of that happens by accident.

"Are we on conference calls?" Pam asks. "Are we messaging? Are we showing up? And do people know we’re showing up?"

That last question is the one worth sitting with. Showing up and being seen aren’t the same thing. Though it might sound counterintuitive, being on camera during a Teams call isn’t the same as being present. Completing deliverables on time isn’t the same as being known.

For business analysis professionals specifically, this matters more than it might for other roles. The value of a business analysis professional is often invisible by design; when analysis is done well, problems don't materialize, decisions don't go sideways, and the work that prevented those outcomes leaves no obvious trace.

If the person doing that work is also invisible, the organization has no way to connect the outcomes to the capability.

You've Been Practising This All Along

Here's what's useful about this conversation for business analysis professionals: the skills required to build visibility are skills you already use every day. Things like stakeholder engagement, relationship building, and asking the right questions of people you've never met before. In other words: forming connections quickly, across levels and domains.

"When you go to events," Pam says, "you just pull out that part of your toolkit and start connecting."

It's something I've practised in my own work through what I call "Take Five to Socialize." At the start of meetings, especially in remote environments, I spend a few minutes getting to know the people in the room before moving to the work. It's less a warm-up exercise and more a relationship investment. And over time, those small moments compound in ways that are hard to trace but impossible to ignore.

The payoff is slow and then sudden. One conversation becomes a name someone remembers. A name becomes a reputation. A reputation becomes an opportunity that never appeared on a job board.

"Networking outperforms every other way of finding a job," Pam says, "including any kind of expertise you could have in beating the bots."

What COVID Quietly Took Away

The pandemic is still reshaping how business analysis professionals think about connection, perhaps more than most professions realize.

For a generation of junior practitioners, the years that would typically have been spent learning in physical proximity to experienced colleagues became years of working alone, communicating through screens, and missing the informal moments where professional identity gets built. Conferences, chapter events, the kind of conversation that happens in a hallway between sessions—all of that disappeared precisely when it would have mattered most.

Lia Spoltore, IIBA Partner Manager for Eastern Canada, names this directly: "I think right now it is a tough place for young professionals trying to get into this profession. They've not had the opportunities to get out. They had the pandemic, and now we've moved into kind of a virtual way of working."

The result is a cohort of practitioners who are competent but disconnected, capable of doing the work but not yet embedded in the community that makes that work meaningful and visible.

The answer, both Pam and Lia suggest, isn't complicated. It just requires a choice. Find one person, make one connection, and show up somewhere you wouldn't normally show up.

"Find what inspires you," Lia says. "Find that person. Find that thing. Lean into that community."

The Values Question Nobody Asks

There's a version of networking that's entirely transactional. It involves accumulating contacts, chasing prominent names, and optimizing for visibility at any cost. It’s usually the version that makes people recoil in horror, and Pam has a word of caution about it.

"Do they match your values?" she asks. "Because I think that's a really critical piece."

Values alignment is what determines whether a professional connection becomes a genuine relationship or just an entry in a contact list. In business analysis, where trust is the currency of every stakeholder conversation, the habit of connecting authentically rather than strategically tends to produce better outcomes. And it's considerably less exhausting.

"If you're not authentic, it's actually exhausting doing the acting all the time."

What Finding Your People Actually Does

The professionals who spoke from the conference floor in Toronto (analysts, consultants, chapter leaders, and a partner manager who took the train from Ottawa to meet people in person) aren’t describing a networking strategy. They're describing something closer to a professional ecosystem: a community that learns together, practises together, and makes each member more capable and more visible than they would be alone.

Clint, in Pam's story, was doing everything right... except for one thing. He was working in a part of the organization where the people who needed to know him couldn't find him.

The work alone was never going to fix that. But being in the right room, at the right moment, with the right people? That might have.

The full conversation—including Pam's thoughts on AI, values, and what it actually felt like to reconnect with the profession after years of virtual-only work—is worth hearing in her own words.

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