It’s a cliché and does not need retelling. Especially in IT services field, it is truer than true and certainly we all know it very well (at times a hard way). However determining how and which new skill to acquire is not easy.
But what triggered this blog, was a book I read couple days back (The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman). The book refreshed my memory about a term coined by Gartner in 2005 … Versatilist. I vaguely remembered reading Gartner press release back then and even discussing it with one of my friend on what it meant for us. (I and my friend were just moving from Project Management roles into wider general management roles in our career) So I searched the press release and re-read it.
What Gartner predicted in 2005 about IT services and outsourcing landscape and what it would mean for people working it IT, was amazingly accurate. Gartner had said “By 2010, landscape for IT professionals will change … enabled by competitive IT skills, knowledge bases, outsourcing … and will put many IT professionals in competition with their peers in other geographical markets”. The article further predicted: “IT departments in most companies will be 30% smaller (as compared to 2005 size) mainly due to automation in SDLC processes, advancement in IT tools and device convergence. All of this leading to employers demanding versatility from employees.” Almost all of this is true today.
If so, maybe we should consider Gartner suggestion … on ‘how and what to learn’ … to be Versatilist … as against specialist or generalist. By Gartner definition Specialist is someone with deep skills in a very focused area; Generalist has broader understanding but shallow skills; whereas Versatilist is the one who can apply depth of the acquired skills to a progressively widening scope of situations at the same time gaining new (deep) skills and assuming wider roles.
I cross checked this definition with my own skills … and realized that I have become more of a Generalist than a Versatilist. And that is alarming. Then I checked with my friend … and he too reached the same conclusion about himself. So maybe it’s true for quite a few ‘experienced’ people like me and my friend … that with career advances over last few years, we have acquired more skills and broader roles and senior positions in the companies, but the skills acquired are relatively shallow. If that is true, we are at odds with Gartner’s definition of ‘hot skills for 2010’.
What should I do? What should we all do?
I think I should go back to basics … and look at how we were ‘learning’ when we were new in this industry. E.g. I remember having to learn C, XVT Libraries, Tuxedo and Informix as part of my first job with Tata Unisys back in 1990. Tata Unisys gave us (bunch of new programmers) a formal training in C and we then had to read books on Informix and C to get further references. XVT and Tuxedo implementation on Unisys platform ware brand-new technologies, and there were hardly any books. We had to go through official manuals and then experiment with all these tools. We wrote lot of programs … surely some were awful … but then we worked with each other, collaborating and helping and reading and what not … finally creating very good working software. We all worked very hard … often more than 13~14 hrs daily … without anyone demanding that we sit late. We all were learning.
I for one did not learn my Solution Design or Project Management or Program Management or People Skills or Contract Management or other General Management Skills the same way. Somehow, while I learned all this and many more things, I did not go through the same rigor and zeal and entrepreneurial spirit. I do not know what and how and why etc.; but my learning process itself was ‘shallow’ and hence probably my skills also remained shallow.
I think I should concentrate more on those key words …
- Go for a formal training if available
- Read lot of related material on the topic (books, manuals, papers; even attend seminars and join user groups and online groups etc)
- Experiment … test the results … and be willing to modify as needed
- Peer groups are important forums where you can test and validate your skills and even take help in areas where you are stuck
Hopefully one day I will be more of a Versatilist than a Generalist. What else do you suggest I should do?
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