Should You Specialize or Generalize Your Skills?

This is a very common question in any industry, and it’s one with merits on both sides of the debate. There is no simple answer to the question, because first of all, there are so many variables. Ultimately, it’s up to you as far as what you want out of life and out of your secular career, so let’s take a look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of both paths.

1. It’s Easier to Specialize

There’s less to remember if you specialize. Generalizing in many fields requires more work, because you’ll need to spend more time researching your fields. You’ll also most likely end up spending more energy in each of those fields if you generalize, because you don’t have a finely honed skill in any of them to make it easier for every job. On the same note, if you specialize, there’s less to learn, and less to keep up to date on, and less to keep fresh in your mind from day to day as you go about your work.

How many subfields can you handle as a generalist? Becoming an expert generalist will take much time, because there are no shortcuts. Each field in your general skill set will have to be added, studied, researched, and practiced before it can be useful.

2. Profitability Variables

Here is where your community environment may have a large part in your decision. Does your generalized set of fields under scrutiny have a lot of competition? You might be better off specializing in that case, because you can corner a niche market and only focus on that specific field. For instance, there might be a lot of computer repair shops in your area, but none of them are experts in mobile device repair, although they may cover it. If you became the mobile device repair expert, specialization could be the best path in your community rather than trying to compete with everyone else, doing the exact same services.

When someone has a problem with their device, they want an expert. If you broke your phone screen and you contacted two repair shops about it, and both wrote you back, one is a computer repair shop covering mobile repair, and another is the ‘mobile repair shop’, which one will you most likely take your phone to? Your advantage is the depth of knowledge and experience you have in that specialized area.

This factor also falls under profitability, because it has to do with economic crisis. The fact is, the more possibilities you have for generating income, which increase as you generalize, the less you will suffer during economic hard times, and the easier it will be to provide for yourself and your family if you have one. That’s a decided perk for generalization.

The quality of your work is also included here. Mastery of a skill takes time, energy, and much practice. As you specialize, you will be developing mastery of a specific skill, and as ‘practice makes perfect’, your work quality will improve faster compared to someone in the same situation who has chosen to generalize, and that has a direct bearing on how quickly you can get a job done and go on to the next one. For someone who does work by the job instead of the hour, that’s a definite perk.

3. Job Security

This is a tough variable to consider. If someone has only specialized in desktop machine repair for their whole career, and nothing else, I would be concerned their speciality might be obsolete eventually. That’s something you have to take into consideration when you are looking at specializing in only one field. Someone who specializes in mobile device repair might not have that concern, based on current trends.

Also, with specialization, your vision and focus could become so narrow that it hampers your skill development along the edges of your field, so it’s good to occasionally take a step back and look around and see if you could expand your specialized skill a bit. Choose a speciality that has a rather broad market. If your speciality is too obscure, you might find it somewhat limiting. Don’t choose something that will put you in less demand, or something that is so easy to acquire that the field in your area is already saturated with specialists.

I believe there are arguments for both sides on this next factor, and that’s generalization versus specialization in an employee situation. Some feel that if you have too wide or too vague of a set of skills on the job, you could be seen as expendable, and be the first against the wall when layoffs hit the company.

However, having a wide set of skills at a job also means that if you already know how to cover one or more other jobs at the company, you might be kept while an employee who only had one skill set might get laid off, and it’s difficult to say exactly what might happen based on management decisions in any company under consideration. In any case, learning new complementary skills on the job will continue building a good base of employability. If worse comes to worse, every skill set you have is another reason you can use to convince your employer not to let you go.

4. Personal Satisfaction

If you specialize in one field, and become very very good at what you do, and become a true expert at it, it’s a good path to a successful and profitable career, and you’ll derive professional and personal satisfaction from that. That is, if you don’t burn out from boredom. It’s easy to get bored by specializing in one field, and if that’s something you feel as a specialist, maybe you should branch out and consider covering some generalized skills in the Tech industry to relieve the boredom. You’re still the expert you’ve always been, but you do a bit of other work on the side to keep it interesting.

Closing Arguments

Whichever path you take, push yourself outside your comfort zone on a regular basis. You might end up stagnating if you don’t. Pushing your boundaries helps you grow by necessitating more learning, researching, and studying, and it will keep you motivated and energized in your career. Covering Technology fields can be compared to travel, in that by exploring different fields and comparing them, you understand how the sub-fields interact and interweave, which can give you a broader background for each sub-field you cover.

For instance, if you’ve specialized in only desktop machine repair and never covered mobile devices or even handled one, if a customer wants to network their mobile device with their desktop, will you be able to help? Perhaps it would have been better if you had generalized just a bit and gained some experience with other devices. Diversification can help you see the big picture clearer.