Generalist vs Specialist: There's No Right Answer for Your Career - Barrett Brooks

When you know how generalists and specialists fit into the stage of a company’s growth, you can better plan for whether you want to develop a generalist or a specialist skill set. What stage is the company you’re at right now? If you want to stay there, do you need to focus on going deep with a specialist skill set or go broader by picking up more ... See more

When it comes to growing your career, there’s long been a thriving debate over the merits of building generalist vs specialist skill sets. Spoiler: there is no right answer.

In reality, whether to build a generalist or specialist skill set (and therefore career path) relates much more to two things:

• What do you enjoy?


• What do organizations where you w

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As a company nears maturity, it needs competent managers to oversee and fine tune existing process. Some of the early specialists start to leave — they’re innovators and implementers, not operators of existing systems. New specialists take their place — those good at maintaining existing processes and keeping them running over long periods of time.