You can be great with Azure, networking, scripting, ServiceNow, whatever. But at some point, the people who move up aren’t just the ones who know stuff. They’re the ones who can make that knowledge usable for other people.

And honestly? Most people suck at that part.

Documentation Isn’t Busy Work. It’s Career Insurance.

I know the reaction already.

“Documentation is boring.”
“I’ll do it later.”
“Everyone should already know this.”

That mindset is exactly why people plateau.

Good documentation does a few big things:

• Makes you look organized even when things are chaotic
• Shows leadership you think long term, not just task to task
• Saves your own future self from pain
• Makes onboarding smoother so you’re not answering the same questions 400 times

And selfishly? It makes you promotable.

Because leadership roles are less about doing and more about enabling.

The Real Skill: Explaining Complex Stuff Simply

This one hits especially hard if you came from support, teaching, consulting, or any customer-facing tech role.

If you can explain identity federation to a CFO without them glazing over, you’re valuable.

If you can explain DNS to a junior tech without sounding condescending, you’re valuable.

If you can write a runbook someone can follow at 2am without calling you, you’re extremely valuable.

That’s not fluff. That’s operational maturity.

Tech People Overestimate Technical Skill

Hard truth:

Most environments don’t fail because someone didn’t know enough.
They fail because communication sucked.

Examples I’ve personally seen:

• Tenant migrations delayed because nobody clarified domain cutover timing
• Security policies misconfigured because requirements weren’t documented clearly
• Cloud costs exploding because nobody explained tagging standards

None of those are technical incompetence.
They’re clarity failures.

If You Want To Level Up Fast, Do This

Nothing fancy. Just consistent habits:

Write like someone else has to own it tomorrow.
Because eventually they will.

Create simple diagrams.
Not perfect. Just understandable.

Explain things verbally before writing them.
If you can’t explain it simply out loud, your doc will suck too.

Assume zero context.
Future you won’t remember everything either.

The Funny Part

Once you start doing this, people assume you’re more technical than you actually are.

Not because you magically learned more.
Because you removed confusion.

And in IT, clarity looks like expertise.

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