Turn Any Life Experience Into Skills Employers Recognize
Think about the last time you hired someone, or were hired yourself.
What did the process actually measure? A degree. A job title. A company name on a resume. Maybe a keyword that matched a job description written five years ago. The system looked for signals it already knew how to read, and filtered out everything it didn’t.
Now think about what that system missed. The veteran who led a team through impossible conditions but couldn’t translate “jump master” into language a recruiter recognized. The woman who stepped away from her career to raise children or care for a parent, and came back with a resume full of “gaps” that were actually years of leadership, coordination, and resilience. The recent graduate who worked through college, captained a team, and volunteered in the community, but could only tell the system they had a degree in English.
The talent was always there. The system just couldn’t see it.
This is the talent crisis hiding in plain sight. And it doesn’t belong to one group or one industry. It belongs to everyone caught between what they have built in themselves and a world that lacks the language to value it.
I recently sat down with Marie Gill and Gina Jeneroux, founders of Aetheon.ai, a platform sitting at the intersection of people in transition and the organizations seeking them, translating skills and potential into a shared language that enables better hiring, development, and workforce decisions. What they are building helped me articulate something I’ve felt but couldn’t quite name: the problem isn’t talent scarcity. The problem is translation failure.
The Currency We’re Missing
Skills really are a new currency to help us understand what we bring to the table, what we’re worth.”
Skills are the new currency of the modern economy. Most people just don’t know what they’re worth.
Gina put it plainly: every experience creates knowledge, skills, and perspective. Military service. Raising children. Volunteering. Mowing the neighbor’s lawn through high school. Taking the community college night class while working a day job. Every single one of those experiences built something real in a person. But our systems, recruiting pipelines, applicant tracking software, resume screeners, are not built to see any of it.
So we end up in this absurd situation where a jump master, someone trained to remain calm under extreme pressure, earn the trust of another human being, and convince them to leap out of a moving aircraft, can’t get past the first round of screening for a sales leadership role. The skills are there. The language to name them isn’t.
The solution isn’t telling people to work harder on their resume. The solution is building a system that can actually see them.
What Fragmentation Hides
One of the most powerful things Marie and Gina shared with me was this reframe: what looks like fragmentation is often versatility and adaptability in disguise.
Think about a military spouse who has moved her family across multiple countries, built community from scratch in each new place, coordinated with military personnel, local organizations, schools, and neighbors, all while raising children and often without a support network of her own. On paper, her resume looks inconsistent. Gaps. Short stints. No linear career arc.
But look at the actual human being in front of you. She is adaptable. She builds trust fast. She leads in ambiguous environments. She gets things done without a playbook.
Those are precisely the skills most companies say they can’t find.
The problem is not the person. The problem is that our systems are trained to see titles and tenure, not capability and character.
We’re operating in a talent marketplace that doesn’t see people who they are.”
It doesn’t stop with military families. I see this acutely in my work with Olympic athletes. Think about what it takes to reach that level. Years of discipline. Relentless adaptation. The ability to perform under pressure when everything is on the line. And yet most Olympians, not Simone Biles, not Mikaela Shiffrin, not the names we know, struggle post-career to find work commensurate with what they’ve actually built in themselves. A $36,000 job for someone who has mastered the psychology of peak performance is not a talent match, it’s a translation failure.
The Language Problem Is Gendered Too
There’s another layer to this that I think deserves more attention than it gets.
Women are systematically undervaluing themselves in the language they use to describe their own work. Marie shared something worth sitting with: in a cohort pilot Aetheon ran last fall, many women were, word by word, minimizing their actual value on CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Not through intention, but through conditioning.
Men write: I led. I created. I drove. I built.
Women write: I supported. I was part of a team. I helped.
Here’s what that subtle language shift actually does in practice. It doesn’t just read as humbler. It reads, to a recruiter or an algorithm, as lower proficiency. A supporter is assumed to be less capable than a driver, even if they accomplished the exact same outcome.
This reflects something deeper about how we’ve built our workplaces around a particular definition of leadership, one rooted in individual assertion rather than collective elevation. The irony is that the skills most associated with the “softer” language, building relationships, creating psychological safety, mobilizing a team, are exactly what organizations desperately need right now. We just don’t have a system that can recognize and reward them.
One third of the women in that pilot found new roles within the pilot window once they understood how they were showing up in the system and learned to tell their story differently. That’s not a resume trick. That’s human potential unlocked through translation.
Building the Rosetta Stone for Human Potential
What Marie and Gina are building at Aetheon is, at its core, a Rosetta Stone between human experience and organizational need.
On the individual side, the platform goes far beyond resume parsing. It surfaces skills from life experience, work, school, volunteering, caregiving, and then assigns proficiency levels. Not just “communication skills” but what level of communication, in what contexts, demonstrated how recently, with what degree of complexity. The result is a digital skills passport that actually represents a person’s full capability.
But the real unlock is the validation layer. Aetheon uses something they call Skills Quests, real-world scenario-based challenges where people apply their skills in action, not on a multiple choice test. The system pulls signals as you work through the challenge, confirming the skills that your resume suggests you have. It’s the difference between believing someone can lead under pressure and watching them do it.
On the employer side, and this is what makes it a true marketplace, Aetheon is translating job descriptions too. Because here’s the other half of the problem: most job descriptions haven’t been meaningfully updated in years. Companies are trying to hire for the work of 2025 using language written in 2015. When you define the role by the skills it actually requires, at the proficiency level it genuinely demands, the match becomes possible in a way it simply wasn’t before.
The Balance Sheet Question
I’ll be direct about where I think this whole conversation ultimately leads.
People show up in the income statement. They almost never show up on the balance sheet. And that accounting error, treating human capability as a cost rather than an asset, is what makes it so easy for companies to cut people the moment a quarter looks uncertain. It’s not because leaders are heartless. It’s because the system is set up to calculate the cost of people and not the value.
If you had to remove the value of a person as an asset every time you removed them as an expense, the conversation about workforce reductions would change entirely. You would be making a strategic trade, not just a line item reduction.
This is Marie’s BHAG, her big hairy audacious goal:
Figuring out how to put human capital genuinely, rigorously, on the balance sheet. Not as a soft ESG measure, but as a real quantified asset that changes how we make decisions about people.”
What This Means for How We Flourish at Work
Here is what I know to be true, and what the research behind flourishing consistently confirms: people cannot bring their full selves to work if they are perpetually forced to minimize who they are. You cannot have engagement without authenticity. You cannot have innovation without psychological safety. And you cannot build either of those in a culture that values credentials over capability.
The future of work demands that we get better at seeing people, all of them. The veteran. The returning caregiver. The athlete. The first-generation college student. The woman who built something extraordinary in every role, but wrote about it in the language she was taught rather than the language the system rewards.
The skills have always been there.
We just finally have the tools to find them.
If this resonates, listen to my full conversation with Marie Gill and Gina Jeneroux on the Flourishing Edge Podcast.
Learn more about Marie Gill and Gina Jeneroux on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish, Marie Gill and Gina Jeneroux. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
