Stephanie Pinion

A Career Built Sideways as Well as Up

What distinguishes Pinion's path is breadth rather than a single vertical climb. After her first agency role she moved into boutique agency work, then in-house recruitment for an e-commerce organization, then across into HR. From HR she went back into technology, into tech consultancies, where she has now spent roughly seven years.

That is four distinct vantage points on the same problem: agency, in-house, HR, and consulting. Each carries its own pressures and its own definition of a good hire, and few practitioners get to see all four from the inside. Pinion has, and the tech consulting environment is where she has chosen to stay.

The Benchmark Set at Infinity Works

The formative chapter was Infinity Works, the first organization Pinion worked in within tech consulting, and a business that grew fast enough to be acquired by Accenture. She is candid that she did not fully appreciate how good the people around her were until she had moved on and had something to measure them against.

Two names stand out. Neil Dunlop, one of the managing directors, and Charlotte Golding, then head of people. Pinion calls them really good facilitators of people: they understood people, and they understood the worth attached to those people, which in a consulting business is the whole game. That understanding is what she has carried forward.

She is precise about how she applies it. The aim was never to replicate what Infinity Works did. The aim is that she now holds a reference standard. "You know what good looks like now," she says. "It sets a benchmark." She has also seen the work done really badly, and treats that as instructive too. Take the learnings from both, she argues, carry them into future organizations, and you are in a good place.

AI, and the Case for Levelling Up

Pinion sees artificial intelligence from two angles at once, which is part of what makes her read on it worth hearing. There is AI as it affects her own job directly. And there is AI as it affects the technology industry she recruits for, where it is a constant discussion point in tech consulting.

On the first, she is direct. People need to level up by using it. Anyone not using AI in their day to day work is going to miss out on opportunities. The corollary is that a huge number of practitioners are now raising their capability at the same time, and Pinion frames that as a genuinely good thing rather than a threat.

On the second, she reaches for a concept tech consulting has used for years: the T-shaped individual. The vertical stroke is deep expertise in a single niche skill set. The crossbar on top is the ability to be multifaceted, to turn a hand to different things. Pinion believes that shape becomes the key one going forward. Individuals will work alongside AI, but the differentiator will be the crossbar: becoming more T-shaped, more generalized, and holding an understanding across a wider spread of disciplines than any one specialism demands.

The Standard She Carries

There is a consistency running underneath Pinion's story that is easy to miss on a first pass. The music industry taught her what she did not want. Infinity Works taught her what she did. Other environments have shown her the work done badly. In each case her instinct has been the same: extract the standard, keep it, and take it into whatever comes next.

It is an unfashionably practical way to build a career. No single employer defines her. What defines her is the benchmark she assembled by comparing them, and the discipline of applying it wherever she lands. As she puts it, once you know what good looks like, you have something to hold everything else against.