This week a person that I trust ask me something that make me think.

How is possible that as a specialist you are a high-performance employee as generalist?

First, I don’t consider myself a Specialist. Due to my current job, I’m more focus on specific areas such as Blockchain, IoT or Bots but, I’m still a General Practitioner in those areas. Maybe my colleagues perceive me as Specialist because I do need to get a medium-to-expert level of expertise in anything I do to feel comfortable when I meet with my peers, and customers (with technical or business background).

Checking one of my favorite bookmarks, the free dictionary, I was able to find clear definitions.

• A Generalist is “a person who is knowledgeable in many fields of study”.
• A Specialist is defined as “a person who specializes in or devotes himself or herself to a particular area of activity, field of research, etc.”.

Ignoring all the definitions for a moment, based on my personal experience, any professional will be “force” to answer the following question in some point of her/his career:

Should I focus on being the best on one area, or should I try to be good in many of them?

In my case, I chose to be a generalist following three simple rules:

1.      Getting knowledge in several areas beyond getting “basic training” or learning for “fancy” articles, prioritizing hands on the ground as most as possible

2.      Building a professional network with specialists in my areas of interest

3.      Keeping me fresh and ready to deep-dive when needed

I believe than being a generalist player in the Technology Industry was the right choose for me because it gave me strong skill sets to allow me to do any type of job with a high quality - even when dealing with the unknow. Also, it allows me to move from job to job and have the right aptitude to be able to face changes or to learn something new being excited about that.  

As usual, I would like to finish this post by recommending a good related article. This time coming from the library of Harvard Business Review (HBR): “When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa”