Most employers can name someone like this. An engineer, analyst or scientist who is excellent at the work and widely respected by peers, yet repeatedly passed over for the roles where their judgement would matter most. When we asked members of our employer panel to describe what held these people back, the answers were strikingly consistent, and almost none of them concerned technical ability.
What the plateau looks like
- Recommendations that are correct but arrive buried in detail, so the decision is taken without them.
- Briefings pitched at fellow specialists when the audience is a budget holder.
- Disagreement expressed as technical correction, which lands as dismissiveness.
- Good work that goes unnoticed because nobody outside the team hears about it.
None of these is a character flaw. They are communication habits that serve a specialist well inside their discipline and poorly outside it. The difficulty is that most specialists have never been assessed on them, so they have had little reason to see them as a capability to develop.
The specialists who progress are not the ones who simplify their expertise. They are the ones who work out what a decision maker needs from it, and give them that first.
Where the Professional Communication standard fits
This is one reason the standard is written to travel alongside every other BIPS standard. Technical specialists briefing non-specialists are one of its core audiences, and two of its six capability areas speak directly to the plateau: audience judgement, which is about knowing what a reader needs rather than what you want to say, and influence, which is about moving a decision without positional authority.
Assessment follows the usual four-stage route. For a specialist, a strong portfolio often includes a decision paper written for a non-technical board, the recording or slides from a briefing to senior leaders, and an example of a recommendation that changed a decision. In the professional discussion, assessors are interested in what the candidate chose to leave out.
A practical starting point
Specialists who want to test themselves can try a simple exercise: take a recent technical recommendation and rewrite its first paragraph so that a sponsor could act on it without reading further. If that feels uncomfortable, the capability gap is probably real. It is also, in our experience, one of the fastest to close once it has been named.
It is also worth remembering that assessment is not only a credential. Several candidates have told our councils that preparing the portfolio was the first time anyone had asked them to look at how their work was received, rather than how good it was.