Will anyone pay me for what I already know?

Every year I sat in a room and put a number against a person's name. Not the number they were worth. The number the band permitted and the budget allowed.

I did that as the reward lead through the UBS and Credit Suisse merger, across a technology population of 13,000 in the Credit Suisse remit.

So when somebody with twenty years behind them asks me whether anyone will pay for what they know, I recognise the question underneath it. They are asking whether their salary was real.

It was real. It was never a measurement of them.

What a salary actually is

A salary is a position in a structure. It is set against a grade, a peer group, a budget cycle, and what the organisation paid the last person who sat in that seat. All four of those are facts about the organisation. None of them is a fact about you.

This matters more than it sounds, because people leaving corporate reach for their old salary as evidence of what they are worth, then lose their nerve when nobody offers it. The number was not portable. It was attached to a seat, and you have left the seat.

The good news is the reverse is also true. The band was capping you as well as paying you. I have sat in calibration conversations where the constraint on somebody's number was not their contribution. It was that moving them would have broken the relativity with three other people, and there was no budget to move those three.

What a buyer actually pays for

An employer buys a bundle. Your availability, your coverage, your continuity, and the fact that somebody is holding the role. A large part of what you were paid for was not the work. It was the being there.

A buyer pays for one thing. A problem going away.

Nobody has ever said "I would like to purchase forty hours a week of general seniority." So the first question is not what you are worth. It is what problem you remove, and for whom, and what it currently costs them to leave it unsolved.

That reframe is uncomfortable, because it means your CV is close to useless here. A CV is a record of seats held. It answers a question nobody buying advisory work is asking.

The thing you are discounting hardest

Here is what most people leaving a large organisation get wrong about their own inventory.

They value the technical skill, which is real and also widely available. They discount the institutional knowledge, because it feels like nothing. It feels like just knowing how things work around here.

It is the most saleable thing you own.

Knowing how a decision actually gets made inside a large regulated organisation, who has to be brought along before the meeting, what makes a proposal die quietly, what the finance function needs to see before it will say yes: that is not general knowledge. It cannot be read anywhere. It takes years inside to acquire, and the people who need it most are outside, guessing.

I have watched vendors and consultants spend six months learning what any Director in the building could have told them in an afternoon. Somebody paid a great deal for that six months.

The test

You do not need a business plan to answer this question. You need one sentence, and it has to survive being said out loud to a stranger.

Name a problem that somebody is currently paying somebody else to solve badly, that you have solved from the inside, more than once.

If you can say that specifically enough that the person hearing it either says "that is us" or says "that is not us", you have something. Both answers are useful. The answer that means you are not ready is the one where they say "interesting, so what does that involve?"

Vagueness is not modesty. It is the absence of a decision.

Is there actually a market

Yes, and it is not small. In the UK, the skilled freelance workforce, the consultants and lawyers and accountants and advisers, runs to roughly two million people and contributed an estimated £193 billion to the economy in 2024, on IPSE's own figures.

That does not tell you that your particular thing will sell. It tells you the category is not a fantasy, which is the fear underneath the question.

What decides your case is narrower and more answerable. Can you name the problem, name the buyer, and point at the moment they feel it?

The honest part

Some people go through this and find that what they know is genuinely tied to one employer's systems and will not travel. That is worth knowing in a fortnight rather than in a year, and it is a reason to look at this properly before you hand in notice, not after.

You are far better off asking the question while you still have a salary.