Great question, by the end of the process we were experts @ holistic level.

But started with very basic web design skills at first.

From the start key "skill" for the pitch / and our clients was we had the BANDWIDTH to focus on implementing testing as a regular / rigorous process for them.

EG most - even big cos - wind up with their good web dev resources completely tied up with 100 other things.

And 10 departments competing for their attention.

I came in and said we can do this, full service and you just have to approve the tests and give us a dev environment.

But started with just basic web design skills / willingness to read the multitude of good resources / books / blogs / thought leaders on CRO an apply their ideas.

EG - Common CRO theme - "try different, high-contrast button colors on your call to action"

Ok, I can do that.

- Take existing page

- set up optimizely or VWO (at the time we used home brew or GoogleWO!)

- make some really great buttons (or outsource on elance for $10)

- get client buy in

- set up the test

- ensure production readiness / testing

- go live

- provide nice reporting format for client weekly that lets them stay involved and see results, and have confidence in your ability to execute.

- prepare next test while first one is running, and remember that a huge % of your best ideas will fail, be agnostic to results but be statistically honest and educate clients under same process / instruction

Simple example, but you can ramp the complexity up from there.

Like "better to have this "sign up now" button go to another page w/form or pop a modal window w/form?"

and on down the list, the CRO blogs / experts / etc have 1000 ideas.

And over time got better about understanding what did / didn't work across clients.

So my win rate crept up from say 20% of tests significant win to 50%+ out of gate.

And every person on my team I hired because we wanted to run a test that I / we couldn't implement ourselves :)

What's your specific interest / skill set that you're trying to adapt over?

I have an analytics background and have been applying for multiple CRO jobs. It's very frustrating the breadth of skills that people want the inhouse CRO guy to have (i.e I've had interview questions on JS frameworks, very advanced stats, non-trivial SQL, CMS systems, photoshop, SEO, paid search, Salesforce ...) especially when I know a lot of whole agencies couldn't tick all those boxes.

Would love to start freelancing this stuff but it seems like it needs so much personal branding