Angela Finlay has spent her career thinking about talent from multiple vantage points: as an HR executive, consultant, business owner, coach, and educator. An adjunct lecturer at Columbia University School of Professional Studies, where she teaches in the M.S. in Human Capital Management and M.S. in Information and Knowledge Strategy programs, Finlay has seen firsthand how quickly the world of work is changing—and how often traditional systems for evaluating talent fail to capture what people can actually do.
Her new book, Skill Stacking: Taking Ownership of Your Career in Changing Times, grew out of that tension. As career paths become less linear and organizations rethink how work is structured, Finlay argues that professionals need a broader way to understand and articulate their value. A résumé, job title, or career ladder may tell part of the story, but they rarely capture the full range of skills, behaviors, and mindsets people develop across their professional and personal lives.
In this Q&A, Finlay discusses the ideas behind Skill Stacking, how her work across consulting, executive leadership, and teaching shaped the book, and why both individuals and organizations need to rethink career growth in a rapidly changing workplace.
How do you define “skill stacking,” and why does it feel especially relevant right now?
The simplest way I define skill stacking is as “an intentional process of building a diverse, layered portfolio of skills, drawn from every dimension of your life, that together create unique professional value that no one else can replicate.” It is not just about learning new things. It is about inventorying everything you have already built, connecting the dots deliberately, and expanding in directions that make you more resilient, more adaptable, and more interesting to employers and to yourself.
I think of it through the STACK framework, which is the backbone of the book. Most of us struggle to list our skills, and we often shortchange ourselves in the process. The STACK model includes supportive skills, your foundational knowledge; tactical skills, your execution abilities developed through experience; adaptive skills, your capacity to pivot and thrive in uncertainty; complementary skills, including the emotional intelligence, communication, and relationship abilities that make all your other skills land; and knowledge-seeking skills, the curiosity and continuous learning drive that keeps you growing. These layers build on each other. They are not siloed. They stack.
I think skill stacking feels especially urgent now because we are at a genuine inflection point. The linear path of education, career, and retirement is simply no longer the map most people are following. And yet we are still evaluating talent as if it were. Résumés, job titles, and single-track career ladders still shape how people are seen. That gap between how work is actually evolving and how we still think about careers is exactly the tension this book is trying to resolve.
How have your experiences across consulting, executive leadership, and teaching shaped the way you think about talent development?
Each of those worlds gave me a completely different vantage point, and it is the combination of all three that shapes my perspective.
In executive leadership, you are inside the system. You are making decisions about people at scale and navigating the tension between what the business needs right now and what will sustain the organization in the long term. I led large-scale human capital transformations, worked across global teams, and navigated mergers and acquisitions, and the organizations that struggled most were often the ones that thought about talent too narrowly. They were looking for people who perfectly matched today’s job description, not those with the capacity and curiosity to grow into what the organization would need next.
Consulting changed my lens entirely. When you work across multiple organizations, you begin to see patterns across industries that insiders may miss. You also become aware of how much organizational strategy depends on the quality of people conversations happening, or not happening, at the leadership table. The companies I advised that were thriving were not necessarily the ones with the biggest learning and development budgets. They were the ones where leaders genuinely believed people development was a strategic imperative, not just an HR program.
Teaching gave me another perspective. In conversations with students, I realized I was watching the workforce of the future prepare to walk into systems that were not always ready for them. I was also watching them underestimate themselves, reducing their value to what was on their résumés and feeling unsure how to connect the dots of everything they had already built and experienced. That gap between what people carry and what they know how to articulate became the central problem I wanted to solve.
Did your experience teaching at Columbia SPS influence the ideas behind the book?
Very much so. In the classroom, we are forward-thinking. We talk about trends and the forces shaping our companies and the world around us, and then we tie those conversations back to people. How is this shaping culture? How do people collaborate in a way that preserves human innovation while leveraging technology?
Those discussions reinforce how important people are in organizations: their individual experiences, skills, abilities, and so much more. They also reinforce what we need to identify and leverage now more than ever.
I have also had the privilege of meeting students with all kinds of experiences, backgrounds, and journeys. I have heard their stories of career pivots, shifts, and curiosity to grow one more skill for their stack. I get to watch people skill stack every day. Often, the missing piece is a deep understanding of the skills they already possess and the ability to create a narrative that showcases them.
What do you hope readers, particularly leaders and professionals navigating a rapidly changing workplace, take away from the book?
I want people to start rethinking how we view careers and our value within them.
For individuals, especially those who are mid-career, feeling stuck, or wondering whether the path they are on still makes sense, my hope is that they start to see their skills as currency. That is how you build ownership in your career. I have sat across from incredibly capable people over the course of my career who had no idea how to articulate what they actually brought to the table. Not because they were not accomplished, but because they did not know how to connect everything they do and show a stack of skills, rather than just a job title and a list of accomplishments.
Your career is not just what is on your résumé. It is the running club you coach, the volunteer board you serve on, and the fact that you have raised children while holding down a demanding job. All of that shapes who you are professionally, as well as the skills you are expanding in the workplace. Taking time to inventory your skills and reframe your mindset around skill stacking can give you the power to know your worth and showcase your value. This is how you become the owner of your career in changing times.
For leaders, the takeaway is that we have been managing talent for an era that no longer exists. Fixed roles, linear paths, résumé- or title-based decisions, and episodic learning were built for stability. We are not in a stable moment, and yet most organizations are still running the same playbook.
The leaders who get this right are not going to win because they have the most talent. They are going to win because they have the most visible, fluid, and intentional systems for moving capability to where it matters. That is the shift.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Human Capital Management program prepares graduates to be world-class HCM strategists able to address changing needs in building and motivating talented, engaged workforces in the private, public, academic, and not-for-profit sectors.
Learn more about the program here. The program is available part-time, full-time, on-campus, and online.
