Save 15 years of your Life!! Start with 20 hours instead

I was a sportsperson at Undergraduate level as a cricketer at U-17 level and played as a top-order batsman. The first rule in batting was to spend time at the crease for the initial overs, finding your feet and pace of the pitch before you attack the bowlers.

My strength was playing with soft hands trying to time the ball than use brute power. On difficult pitches it helped rotate strike effectively while on friendly pitches, I would play conventional boundary shots with ease. I did fairly well and even win a few awards.

It was year 2004 when I had to make the most important decision of my life after passing out from class X.

I decided to pursue engineering.

My choice of engineering was based more out of repulsion towards mugging up hard to remember nomenclature of ‘flora and fauna’.

It is year 2020 now and refrain from calling myself an engineer. I haven’t contributed anything of significance to the engineering community.

If I were to go back in time, would I choose differently?

Maybe or maybe not.

My academic experience saw me adding another degree in MBA before I started my professional journey. I have brought that sportsman spirit to every professional challenge in life. I would consider having made a professional identity for myself.

Am I considered a professional with specialized skills?

Absolutely not. Working in different sectors, in different roles one would find it difficult to call me a specialist.

Having committed to a life of a computer engineer at the age of 15, would I be as successful if I worked on building only the skills related to my domain?

What is it that has helped me then work for international brands and global organizations in projects of global impact?

Read on….

Generalization vs Specialization?

There is a huge ongoing debate on whether it is right of parents to push their kids into coding at an age as early as 6. There are some who advocate kids to start as early as they can emulating the journey of some of the iconic figures like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs among many others. I agree with that fact that there can’t be anything better than identifying the purpose of your life and the path you want to take as early as you can. The threat looms large on certain jobs with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

At the same time there are some who feel deep generalists might replace specialists. Generalists tend to be process-driven and demonstrate an ability to be more agile, adaptable and bring rich experience in implementing best practices that can be applied across sectors. With higher automation, jobs in Testing, Quality Checks might come under threat. Even, coding which is a highly sought-after skill today might face threat from open source platforms. More than 80% people work in areas not related to their specialization in graduation. If early specialization doesn’t provide you with the opportunities you thought it would, what next?

A Case for Deep Generalization

A high level of dependence on narrow set of specialized skills makes a professional vulnerable with increasing adoption of automation and digital transformation.

The future of jobs will be characterized by requirement of a more comprehensive spread of skills across:

1)     Business Growth – These are the skills that directly impact the top-line growth or improve the system efficiencies to drive bottom-line. Skills in Sales and Marketing, Account Management, Business Process Improvement, Problem-Solving, Agile Methodologies generally contribute to business growth.

2)     Technology – These are technical skills leveraging competency with tools and data management to add value and solve real-life problems. Software Development Life Cycle Management, Analytics, Productivity tools are some of the domains one should look to build skills in.

3)     Leadership – Interpersonal skills, Conflict and Change Management

The progress in your career depends on the appraisal system which evaluates your performance on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The KPIs in the initial stages of my career focused on core skills around Marketing and Business Development. My appraisal evaluated my achievement of the sales target, New Dealer growth and scheme design and implementation. As I progressed in my professional career, the skills-spread widened to provide exposure to Digital marketing, Analytics, Vendor Management, Team Management in the paints and industrial chemicals sector.

The skills while having a strong focus around Sales Funnel management can be replicated in other industries or other job-roles. You will find many salespersons switching industries or taking up marketing-focused role. So, your deep expertise in sales in helping you progress in your career.

Deep Generalization focuses on building related set of skills that adds USP to your CV in a crowded set of resumes. While niche in your domain, it has wide range of applications across industries and roles.

It did help me as exposure to designing marketing campaigns and scheme implementation helped start my own venture.

I started with the vision of building a ranking platform for sportsmen at grassroot level. I built a scorekeeping app to replace pen and paper scoring in competitive sports. The journey helped me build skills relevant to product management.

I went on to work on assignments with UNICEF and World Bank in areas of Digital and Data-driven transformation in the education sector. This time I brought my experience of Business Analysis to help bring a data-driven approach to development in the social sector.

In seven years of my professional experience, I built a good spread of skills that now is relevant across sectors in roles driving strategic growth.

The lucrative jobs look for Specialized Skills. How can I compete with a generic profile?

Building a strong profile based on deep generalization depends on strengthening core skills while adding skills that prepares you for the jobs of the future. Let me illustrate that with an example.

A dear friend of mine started his career with ICICI bank in Trade Finance. His short stint was focused on acquiring new clients. He soon moved in an operational role with Citi Bank as a Project Manager responsible for supply chain process and risk management in Finance domain. In the five years that he spent with them, he built and managed products leveraging emerging technologies like Robotic Process Automation. He is currently working with a start-up as Product owner launching new products that are revolutionizing SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) trade financing. His core skillsets around client management has helped him effectively understand customer pain points. His deep knowledge of the value-chain in Trade Finance has helped him build products that solve the business problem-statement effectively.

Following were his key to success as a Product Owner:

·      Build a problem-solving approach as a core skill focused around effective client management

·      Gaining expertise in his knowledge of emerging technologies and use them to build successful products

·      Deep understanding of Trade Finance value chain

·      Experience of Project Management in an agile environment in Citi Bank which is helping him now achieve great ROI on products

·      His networking with startups as a volunteer has helped him understand the role of Product Owner and make the transition from Project Management to building products.

If you go through his journey, his experiences and knowledge helped him build a profile of deep generalization in what we call as Business Analysis. His skills are relevant in areas of Client Management, Project Management, Product Management each being a ground of large number of lucrative opportunities.

We have been operating in an agile environment without calling ourselves a ‘Scrum-master’ for a long time.

He is now creating a blog in career guidance which will add another set of skills to his repository. Can you name some:

Content Marketing, SEO, SMO are few of those. I am sure these will help him bring a much more refined approach to his current and future job responsibilities.

All the lucrative job opportunities today despite the fancy nomenclatures focus on doing the basic things effectively 

What can I Do? Embrace the power of 1%

What do you make of the image here? Try to think and share your views in the comments before you read further.

The image denotes the power of compounding.

If you had invested ?10,000 in 2009 in Bajaj Finance, your investment would be worth almost 60 lakh.

You can bring the power of compounding to the growth in your professional journey. If you practice your skills and make a 1% improvement every day, your skills would strengthen more than 30 times. On the other hand, if you find yourself stagnated and lose 1% by not progressing with the market, worth of your skills would be fraction of what it is today.

The professional value in the job market is directly correlated with your skill-development journey as we transition towards becoming a skill-based economy.

Focus on incremental targets in your skill-development journey.

Try practicing core skills daily while allocating appropriate man-hours to other complementary skills

If you aim to be Digital Marketing Expert, start with your niche in either content, SEO/SMO. Choose LinkedIn, Quora or any other relevant platform and start writing. You will find your 100th post to be a significant improvement to your first. You can then bring your template of success to other platforms opening avenues in Facebook marketing, Instagram Marketing, Influencer Marketing etc.

Making a big professional commitment like doing a year long certificate course in Machine Learning has implications on financial as well as personal balance. Taking that decision without the conviction makes the predictability of successful outcome questionable. Once you have invested your time, money and efforts you do all to justify your decision of pursuing a career in Data Science even if it doesn’t excite you.

Spending 20 hours on the other hand gives you a decent exposure and help build a conviction if you want to put more time and efforts into gaining the expertise in the domain. Don’t fall into the trap of action paralysis. Pick up an online course to guide you while you pursue an internship to put your skills to practice on a live assignment.

A better step by step approach could be to do the following:

1.      Identify a role that excites you and would want to take up

2.      Map the skills required to excel in that role

3.      Build a niche skillset combining skills in emerging technologies with your core skill which has applications across wide range of job-roles and industries

4.      Practice you core skill daily

5.      Plan a calendar around your skill-development to create your individual ‘learning tree’

6.      Create incremental milestones achieving small targets in a pre-defined time interval

How are you progressing in your professional journey? Would you adopt a path towards becoming a specialist or a deep generalist?

Share your experience and views on which path do you find the best.