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Are you eager to reinvent your career but stuck on how to make it happen? This common dilemma was the genesis for the theme for this year's Women Rainmakers programs at the midyear and annual meetings: Jill Be Nimble: Reinventing Your Practice.

My client Diane had spent her career in a Fortune 20 corporation in a variety of challenging roles. After 25 years, the thrill was largely gone but the glass ceiling wasn't. Then opportunity struck when she heard that the position for head of Executive Education for one of the country's top business schools was open. For the first time in a long time, she felt inspired.

There was just a tiny hitch. She had no experience in university administration, much less Executive Education. How did Diane ultimately win her dream job, competing against a host of directors of Executive Education programs at the country's leading business schools?

The short answer is that she used a competitive advantage strategy to define and sell her unique qualifications for the job. This strategy has helped lawyers in corporations, law firms, and other settings around the country make successful career transitions within their organizations as well as into other firms, corporations, government, academia, legal corporations and non-profits, solo practice, and outside the law.

Adopting a competitive advantage approach to define and sell yourself is the cornerstone of true nimbleness in reinventing your career. Prospective employers look for round pegs for round holes. This is particularly true in a weak economy, a buyer's market with plenty of round pegs competing for a limited number of spots. A competitive advantage strategy draws specific factual links between your skills and accomplishments and their needs. Sounds simple and straightforward? It isn't.

Let's return to the example of Diane. Had Diane adopted the strategy that job-seekers and career re-inventors generally do, she would have written a letter pointing out to the Search Committee that she had 25 years of successful business experience and excellent interpersonal, communication, and management skills. While true, this letter would have gone straight to the circular file.

The information in a typical cover letter like the one above is interesting, but not compelling, and certainly insufficient to get an interview, much less a job, especially as a dark horse candidate. What we did was build the strongest factual case we could for her candidacy, strong enough to win her the job.

How? Our organizing point was Diane's unique competitive advantages for the job. The competitive advantage strategy I developed and used with Diane assumes that competitive advantages are specific factual themes or experiences that demonstrate value in a prospective employer's terms. They draw specific, factual links between a prospective employer's needs and an individual's experience and skills.

Competitive advantage statements are NOT generic declarations of value, such as "I possess excellent interpersonal, communication, and management skills." Just claiming to have certain skills doesn't make it so, and it certainly won't convince a prospective employer (or a partner at your firm) that you are right for a new type of opportunity.

Competitive advantages ARE objective, fact-based demonstrations of value. In Diane's case, this included experience organizing successful nationwide educational seminars for executives, established relationships with in-house development executives in the Fortune 500 who make purchase decisions about executive education, an MBA (credibility with, ability to speak the language of the professors who staffed the Executive Education programs), and personal executive experience (the target market for the Executive Education programs).

This strategy works for lawyers, too. For example, a lawyer client was desperate for a radical career change from a big corporate law firm to the fashion industry, but was wed to a standard approach to prospective employers and not getting anywhere in the search. The competitive advantage letter I drafted to a high-end retailer in the fashion industry, is an example of how powerful this approach can be (names have been changed):

I am writing to inquire about the recently vacated General Counsel position at XXX. As the enclosed resume indicates, I have been practicing corporate law for nearly 10 years with two large international law firms in New York and California, and have prior experience and training in the fashion industry.

More than 80% of my practice in New York was devoted to representing retail clients such as Prada, Barney's, and Steuben. During the two years prior to XXX IPO, I functioned as their lead outside counsel, handling a broad array of responsibilities from securitization financings to corporate restructurings. In addition, I am multilingual, studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and worked at Ralph Lauren. I believe my background in fashion and law would suit XXX's needs very well.

Competitive advantages can drive your own career reinvention. How can you reinvent your practice? Nimble Jills and Jacks know that practicing reinvention through defining and marketing their competitive advantages for new opportunities with current or prospective employers can be indispensable to surmounting and triumphing over the hurdles that keep us from our best and most satisfying work.