How to Build a Body of Work From Your Experience

Do you have a body of work?

Ma’am, if you’re a professional woman, with decades of experience behind you then your answer should be “Indeed, I do!” If not (or if you don’t think you have one) you just need a way to organize the experience you already have into a cohesive body of work that you can share with the rest of us. That’s what we’re going to discuss in this post.

TL;DR:

• Building a body of work means turning decades of professional and life experience into something cohesive and shareable.
• Your first digital product doesn’t need to capture everything you know. It needs to solve one specific problem for one specific person.
• The knowledge that feels ordinary to you, the questions people ask you (and without paying for the answer), is usually the most valuable place to start your body of work.
• A body of work is built one piece at a time. Your first piece is one entry in it, not the whole thing.
• Starting small and finishing something is worth more than a perfect plan that never moves forward.

What Does It Mean to Build a Body of Work?

A body of work is the collection of things you create over time that reflect what you know and how you think. It’s not one course or one guide. It’s the full arc of your experience, built one piece at a time, that shows the shape of your knowledge over time.

For much of your career, you demonstrated your skills in meetings, client calls, hallway conversations and even over a work lunch or two. What you said helped your colleagues and clients, but it probably stayed pretty invisible outside the room where it happened.

Building a body of work means taking that same knowledge and putting it into a format that exists outside your brain: a guide, a mini-course, a program, something someone can pick up and use even when you’re not in the room.

You’ve already done the hardest part by spending years developing your intuition and judgment in your field of work. What’s left now is figuring out how to package it all up into a body of work that represents you and what you have to offer.

How Do I Turn Decades of Experience Into a Body of Work?

You turn decades of experience into a body of work by figuring out your first piece. Then your next piece and then the next. Once you have all the pieces you feel represent how you want to show up, then you give them all a home. Ideally, it will be an online home or showcase, but it could also show up as a book or even a program.

The key is to figure out your focus before you create anything. Think about what you want to be known for. One thing you can do is pick one problem you’ve solved for people many times over, and create the first piece for your body of work around solving that. (This is just one idea, you have so many options on how to pull all your work together!)

I suggest that your first piece be a digital product of some sort. Digital products are easy to make and you have many format options.

Here’s how you’d go about creating your first piece:

1. List the questions people ask you without paying you for the answer. These are the ones you’ve answered so many times they feel obvious. Obvious to you is often exactly what someone else is searching for because it’s NOT obvious to them.
2. Pick the one that comes up most often. This shouldn’t be the most impressive question. Instead look for the most repeated one. Repetition is the signal to you that this information is in demand, even if it doesn’t feel like your biggest achievement (you’re the expert, remember).
3. Write down how you’d walk a friend through it in twenty minutes. That’s your outline for your digital product (even if you’re not sure what the format is at this point). The goal is for your piece to help people solve one problem, the faster the better.
4. Save everything else for later. Remember: Your body of work will grow over time. This first piece doesn’t have to hold every single thing you know about the problem. You just want to make sure it holds one useful, complete idea.

Note: This is where a lot of momentum gets lost. It’s usually not in the writing or creating of your first digital product, but in the decision of what to include in it. When you’ve spent decades getting good at your job, narrowing down to one teachable moment of it can feel like you’re shortchanging what you know. But what you’re doing here is setting that first brick and you can continue to build upon it with other digital products you create.

I made a mistake many years back when I started working on my own body of work. I wanted to teach people how to create an online course. This was becoming very popular online at the time and I wasn’t happy with how others were teaching it (because it was my career and all).

But I didn’t match what people were asking for with what I was teaching.

They wanted to know how to get the course online to sell – not how to design a course using pedagogy and instructional strategies. This is because “gurus” told them you just need to make a string of videos and upload them to Teachable. So when the people I wanted to help compared what I was teaching to what the gurus were saying, it didn’t match.

I’m sharing this for you to understand the need to focus on the question people are asking (the other stuff can come later). This is important if you decide to build your body of work around a collection of digital products that you want to sell online.

What Should My First Digital Product Look Like?

Your first digital product should be small enough to finish in a matter of weeks, not months. Think about creating a short guide, a mini-training, or a single-topic workshop. Don’t worry about creating a twelve-module program for your first product.

A short, finished digital product that solves one real problem is how you kick off building your body of work and getting it out in public. Remember, we’re focusing on that first brick.

A few formats that work well as a first piece:

• A short guide or workbook that walks through one process step by step, the kind of thing you’d hand a new hire or a client on day one.
• A single-topic mini-training, recorded once, that teaches one skill or one framework you use regularly.
• A short workshop or template pack built around one deliverable, like a checklist, a planning tool, or a process map.

None of these product types require video production skills or months of your time. They only require the knowledge you already have and a “container” to put it in. Once your first piece exists, you’ll know exactly what the next entry in your body of work should be, because the people who used the first one will tell you what they need next.

How Do I Know My Experience Is Useful?

Your experience is worth sharing if people have already come to you for it, paid or not.

If colleagues, clients, or friends have asked you the same kind of question more than once, that’s evidence your knowledge solves a real problem for real people. According to Encore.org, a nonprofit focused on people building meaningful second-act careers, the experience gained across a first career is one of the most underused resources available to someone starting something new. You don’t need outside validation to confirm what the people around you have already been telling you for years.💃🏽

It might be helpful to separate two different questions you might be asking yourself.

• Am I the best in the world at this?
• Have I solved this problem for people before, in a way that helped them?

The first question is a trap!

Almost no one clears that bar, and trying to “get better” to reach that bar is how so many ideas stay in a notes folder for years.

The second question is the one that you should focus on, and if you’ve been doing this work for any real stretch of time, the answer is almost certainly yes, Yes, YES!

Where Do I Start When I Don’t Know Where to Start?

You start by picking the smallest true thing you know how to teach, and building that first. Not the biggest idea. The smallest complete one.

If you’ve been “thinking about it” for a while, the thinking itself has likely become the obstacle. A body of work only exists once something is finished and you’re showing it off, even something small. If you want a deeper walkthrough of shaping what you already know into that first finished piece, How to Turn Your Knowledge into a Digital Product goes further into that step.

The goal isn’t to build your whole body of work this month. It’s to build the first piece of it.

FAQs About Building Your Body of Work