Being a jack of all trades is highly overrated. It can help make you an interesting person, which does have a lot of value, and can add a lot of joy to your life. But as far as your career is concerned, your earning potential, and your overall value in the workplace, a jack of all trades is basically a snoozefest.
What you have to understand is that your skill set (and it’s components) has a floor and a ceiling. Both are important.
Your Floor
The first thing you need to understand is your floor. This is the bottom end of your skill set – the minimum competency. When you’re building up skills, most of your skills need to be at minimum competency, and that’s it. If you’re a journalist with a blog/site you update, you don’t need to be a web developer. You need to know how to post things yourself and make the posts look decent. That’s it. Anything after that is essentially a waste.
If you’re a web developer, you need communication skills (working with teams, clients, etc.). But not at the same level as a PR professional. Know how good your communication needs to be, and stop there.
What happens is that people try to develop skills that aren’t critical to their field, but can be kind of helpful. In over 90% of cases, this doesn’t increase your value. It may increase it slightly, but not enough to be worth the added investment. Most of your growth time should be focused on building your ceiling.
Your Ceiling
While your floor is the minimum competency level of your skills, your ceiling is your highest competency level. This is what you should be focusing on.
It’s not so hard to find a good web developer. And honestly, that’s all most people need. But it can be much harder to find a high level Ruby on Rails developer. There may not be quite as much need, but the value placed on that individual is so much higher. The earning potential skyrockets. Why?
Most people build up their skill sets to about 70-80%. At that point, there is a high level of competency, you have value in the workplace, and people value what you do. 70-80% works. It’s also much easier to get to that level. The effort to get from 40% competency to 80% is much less than it is to get from 80% to 85%.
For example, I make my own beer. There’s probably about 4 styles that I do on a regular basis, sometimes with little tweaks. People often comment on how cool it is that I make my own beer, love it at parties, etc. But the main reason they’re impressed is because they don’t know the first thing about making beer. From the viewpoint of a 0% competency level, 50% competency looks really impressive. Honestly, it’s not. What I do is pretty straightforward, and is mostly what I learned my first 1-2 times making beer – maybe some minor tweaks along the way. The effort to get to the next level is significantly higher. For me, they payout really isn’t there to go much higher. The next level of beer just isn’t that important for what I do (it’s a fun hobby, and I’ll continue to experiment, but that’s enough).
Since that extra few percent takes a lot of work compared to what it took to get to this point, people stop. They become “good enough.” The extra value from raising your ceiling is what makes you valuable because so few people do it. They put their time into one of two categories (typically)
- Things that make them feel productive, but really aren’t
- Building up the low skills sets because they feel it makes them more well rounded and more marketable.
Evaluate Your Floor and Ceiling, and Adjust
Listen to others and get honest feedback. You need people (friends, coworkers, network, etc.) who will tell you wear your weaknesses lie. Listen to that. If you have a weakness, you need to bring it up to floor level. A weakness should mean it’s below the level where it should be, not compared to someone who is great at it. Bring those weaknesses that are detracting from your work/value up to where they need to be so that they are not a liability.
Then you need to start figuring out what it means to excel in your field. What are the skills that most people don’t develop that can make you invaluable? What do people in your field do well, but not exceptionally well? What are you really good at that you can be one of the best at? Sometimes, these are easy questions and sometimes they take some real time to think through. But the work there pays off much more than spinning your wheels with what everyone else is doing.
