Precious OkoroI left the title before I found the one that fit.
I stayed in a job longer than I should have.
I wouldn’t say anything wrong happened. That was the problem. The work was steady, and it was the same work I’d done for years, the kind the industry had moved past while I kept doing it well. Think about the redundant tasks, traditional deliverables of the craft that still worked but no longer led anywhere. I was good at it, and I was standing still, and after a while those two facts stopped canceling out.
I started to feel like I was in a deficit. Not failing, exactly. Falling behind, in a way that’s harder to name because nobody around you is sounding an alarm. So I did the only thing that felt like moving. I started learning.
The Deficit
I didn’t have a plan at first. I had a feeling that the ground had shifted and I hadn’t, and that if I waited for the job to teach me the new thing, I’d wait forever.
So I built my own way through it. A personalized roadmap across agentic content design and AI content strategy, because those were the words that kept appearing at the edge of the field I already knew. I took courses in conversation design and prompt engineering. I made myself understand agentic systems and AI agents, not at the level of building them, but enough to see how they actually worked and where they broke.
Somewhere in that stretch, the fog cleared into something specific. I didn’t want to do AI in general. I wanted to help AI agents and products earn trust, and communicate with the humans who’d eventually use them like humans, not like the output of a robotics lab. That was the thing. The gap between what these systems could do and how badly they explained themselves to a person. That gap was mine. It was content design, aimed somewhere new.
Knowing what I wanted didn’t make me feel better. It made the deficit sharper, because now I could see the work and couldn’t see anyone hiring for it.
The Part Where I Left
Here’s the part I don’t usually lead with.
I decided no one would hire me for this. The roles I wanted didn’t obviously exist, at least not with titles I could search, and the roles that existed were the ones I was trying to leave. So I did the thing that felt honest at the time. I left. I stopped identifying as just a content designer. I stopped using the title, because it felt like it belonged to the standing-still version of me, and I didn’t want to be her anymore.
That’s a strange place to be. You’ve outgrown the old name, and you haven’t earned the new one. You’re not quitting the field so much as quitting your description of yourself in it, and there’s no ceremony for that. Just a quiet decision to stop saying a word.
I’d like to tell you I had a plan for what came next. I didn’t. I had a hunch and a lot of unspent learning and no clear place to put either.
The Post
So I wrote a LinkedIn post about agentic content design. Not a strategy. Not a launch. Just the thing I’d been learning and thinking about, written down plainly, because I had nowhere else to put it.
It got traction. Real traction, the kind I hadn’t felt in a long time. Guest blog invitations. New followers who cared about the exact thing I cared about. Strangers responding as if I’d said something they’d been waiting to hear. For the first time in longer than I want to admit, I felt like I knew which part of content design was mine.
This was the turning point I needed. Not a job offer, not a bold leap, not a mentor’s speech. One post, written from the part of me that had been quietly learning while the rest of me thought it was falling behind. It turned out the deficit had been an investment the whole time. I just couldn’t see it until someone else did.
What I Call Myself Now
I came back to content design, but not to the version I left.
I design how AI communicates, behaves, and earns trust. I still call it content design, because that’s what it is; the craft was never the problem. But the layer moved. It moved up, into the part of the product where an agent decides what to say when it’s unsure, what to admit when it’s wrong, and how to ask before it acts on someone’s behalf. That’s the work I quit the field to find, and it was content design the entire time.
If you’re standing where I was, good at work that no longer leads anywhere, feeling a deficit nobody else has noticed yet, I won’t tell you to leap. I’ll tell you the smaller, truer thing. Start learning the part you’re drawn to, and then say one honest thing about it in public. That post you’re afraid is too small is probably the one that shows you what’s yours.
I’m building in this space now, in the open, figuring it out as I go. If any of this sounds like where you are, follow along. I think you’ll recognize the deficit, and I think you’ll be surprised what it turns into.
And, in the end, it was content design the entire time.