Five things I told an aspiring board director this week about turning a governance diploma into a board portfolio
By Wassim Karkabi, Founder and Executive Chairman, Global Board Institute
Every few weeks I have a version of the same conversation. This week it was with a mid-career investment professional who is finishing our director diploma. He has completed the modules, read far more of the additional resources than he needed to, had a demanding year at work, and is a little behind the timeline he set himself. He asked the question everyone asks at that point: what comes next?
What follows is what I told him, with the identifying details removed. I am sharing it because the answer is the same for almost everyone who wants to build a portfolio of board roles, and because the mistakes people make after the diploma are far more expensive than the ones they make during it.
1. The certificate is the foundation, not the building
A governance diploma is essential. It is also not what gets you the seat.
Finish it, get the piece of paper, and then put it in your background where it belongs. What it gives you is real: the language of governance, the legal duties, the frameworks for risk and oversight and, if you take the case studies seriously, the habit of not accepting a board paper at face value.
But nobody appoints a director because of a certificate alone. Nomination committees appoint people they can see. They look at a profile from the outside and ask whether this person makes sense for the seat they are trying to fill. If the answer is not visible within a minute, the qualification does not rescue you.
So the diploma is step one. The work that gets you found is step two, and that is the work most people never start.
2. Your profile has to make sense for one seat, not every seat
The most common mistake I see in aspiring directors is chasing every seat that comes up. It feels like momentum. It is a distraction, and it dilutes the one thing you are trying to build: a clear identity as a professional.
Here is the test I use. Imagine a nomination committee member reading your profile for the first time. Within a minute they should be able to say: yes, this person makes sense for this kind of board. They should equally be able to say that it does not make sense for the other two or three kinds of board.
That clarity is your niche, and a niche is not a limitation. Once you choose the seat, you can go one mile deep on it. You can become one of the top ten people in your geography for that kind of board, or one of the top two or three in that specific niche. You become the person others point to when that seat opens.
The professional I spoke to this week put it well himself: he wants the seats where he can add value, not simply the seats he would like to have. That is exactly the right filter. Value first. Preference second.
3. Visibility is a plan, not a personality
Once you know which seat you are building towards, you have to become findable for it. This is where two objections usually appear.
The first is temperament. Some people love the spotlight and enjoy publishing, commenting and being part of the conversation. Others would rather never write a post. Both can build a board profile, but the plans look different. If you are not an extrovert, you do not have to become one. You will, however, need to do other things: speak in the right rooms, contribute to the right bodies, be quoted, be referenced. The only plan I rule out is silence.
The second objection is policy. Many experienced professionals, especially in finance, work under employer rules that restrict what they can say publicly about specific companies. The professional I spoke with this week is in exactly that position.
My answer is that the restriction points in the right direction anyway. Across the profiles we analyse for the people we work with, the pattern is consistent. The posts that travel furthest are not the critical ones. They are the ones that guide, teach or share something positive and useful. Criticism does not build a board reputation. Generosity does. So if you are restricted, be general, be educational and be constructive. That is not a compromise. It is the approach that works regardless.
A practical note: a great deal of the execution can now be accelerated with AI. Research, first drafts, summarising the long reading that governance inevitably involves. Use it. The judgement about what you stand for still has to be yours.
4. Board judgement is knowing when to say "not yet"
People who finish our diploma often tell me the case studies were harder than the course material. That is deliberate, and I have discussed it with the course designers. If you answer quickly, you can probably get the answer right. If you dig deeper, you get something better than the right answer: the information you actually needed to make an informed decision.
That is the habit a board seat demands, because in a real boardroom the answer is rarely sitting in the papers circulated before the meeting. The pack is thorough. It is also rarely the whole picture, and the clock is always running.
The director who adds value is the one willing to say: let's not decide this today. Let's take a step back. Somebody needs to look at this further before we can decide. Otherwise we are making a quick decision that may land in the wrong direction.
It is not a comfortable sentence to say in the room. It is often the most valuable one. Diligence is a muscle, and the time to build it is before you are appointed, not after.
5. Financial risk is insurable. Reputational risk is not.
This is the point I make to almost everyone, and it is the one that produced the strongest reaction this week.
If a board makes a bad call and the company is sued, there is directors' and officers' insurance. In most cases, the financial exposure a director carries can be insured against. What no policy covers is your name next to the wrong company. That damage cannot be recovered, and it follows you for years.
The professional I spoke with understood this instantly, because he lives on the other side of it. Before he reads a single page of a pitch deck, he looks at who runs the company and who sits on its board. If a name appears that he associates with a past mess, the analysis ends there. He never gets to the assets. That is how many experienced investors read a board: not the strategy, not the numbers, the names.
So before you chase a seat, run the test in reverse. If this company ends up in the news for the wrong reasons in three years, would you be comfortable explaining why you were on the board? If the answer takes more than a second, you already have your answer. Choose the seats you decline as carefully as the seats you accept.
The journey is repeatable
When I start working with an aspiring director, the goal is never one board seat. The goal is a repeatable journey.
It begins with an honest diagnosis of what your CV, board bio, LinkedIn and public footprint say about you today, and what they need to say for the seat you want. It becomes a plan built around your niche, your constraints and your appetite for visibility. It is reviewed every quarter: what changed, what worked, where to pivot. And it continues until the first paid board position lands.
At that point something more important than a seat has happened. You understand what got you there, and you can run the same process for the next role, and the one after that. That is how a board portfolio gets built. Not by luck, and not by a certificate. By a process you own.
