Greetings Programs!

Today we’re going to talk about managing skillsets over time to give oneself the best chance of long term career success and contentment.

Introduction

In a perfect world we would all be geniuses with photographic memories and could maintain the maximum attained level of skill for anything we trained for. Sadly this is not how it works for 99.99 percent of the population. It takes time and effort to develop skill, and when we stop doing that thing, skill deteriorates, memory fades.

What’s more, we now live in the age of digital transformation, a time of rapid change and upheaval. There is a good chance that the job you are doing today will not exist in 20 years.

When we combine the perishability of knowledge and skills with a rapidly evolving workplace, it’s self evident that it would be wise to implement some sort of strategy. I have come across several, which I will cover in the following paragraphs. Let’s start with the one everyone knows: T shaped Skillset.

T Shaped Skillset

The T is the classic skillset mix that’s been promoted for a very long time. It’s based on the notion of developing deep expertise in one discipline, with a set of supporting skills around it. This was a very successful industrial age strategy and what a typical university education is designed to produce.

The fundamental problem with the T is it’s very risky in the current day and age. To use an old analogy, if you’re an expert in making buggy whips and people start buying cars, you’re going to have to reskill, and that takes time. You’re going to have a lot of downtime of not making much money while the reskilling is occurring. Been there, done that, not the best strategy for today.

The obvious solution is to have a plan B. Which brings us to the next strategy.

Pi Shaped Skillset

With a Pi shaped skillet, you cultivate a secondary skillset alongside the primary skillset you use in your day job. Second Skilling is a way to ramp up on emerging or disruptive technology without the income and career impact of reskilling. Additionally it also has the benefit of some cross-pollination, where deeply learned skills can be used across knowledge domains.

There is a third common strategy which typically seen with self employed and business owners/entrepreneurs, which we will cover next.

Skill Stacking

Skill stackers take a number of skills and combine them to good effect. You don’t have to be particularly great at any of them, but you know how to combine them to produce results. Skill stackers tend to be independent consultants, business owners, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

Skill stacking leverages the concept of the Pareto Principle, which states that approximately 80% of results come from 20% of effort.

In his 2011 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the ten thousand hour rule, which roughly translates to the idea that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master something.

If we combine these two ideas of the Pareto Principle and the 10,000 hour rule, we come up with the idea that if we invest approximately 2000 hours of effort in learning and practicing something, we’re getting some real efficiency out of our time, which enables us to have a broader and deeper skillset than we might otherwise be capable of.

Broadening and Creativity

One thing I have observed, is that broadening your horizons and learning a little about a lot of things, particularly in the arts, can beneficial on a number of levels. For example, Nobel prize winning Scientists are 2.85 times more likely to engage in arts and crafts than their counterparts.

Closing thoughts

We live in a world where to stay relevant professionally, we have to be agile; always preparing ourselves for the next opportunity. It’s exciting and frightening at the same time. Having a strategy to stay in position to take advantage of new opportunities is really important. I hope you enjoyed the read, and I’ll see you around.

-s