Law of Diminishing Returns - Skills and Workplace

Just curious how you manage this particular paradigm. Let's be honest, we don't live in a Utopian society and this everyone can be an astronaut is a bunch of junk.

With that prefaced so you know where I stand how do you maximize your usefulness. (Not everyone can be the greatest developer or manager). It's just fact....

Do you identify your skills and maximize those or do you try to fill gaps where needed? If so to what degree? I find myself capping out in several skills, I will never be better than the elite, but I am really good. If I continue to maintain I will only maintain status quo. Time to move on I suppose.....

A lot of open ended questions but I am curious how you manage your own career.

Thanks.

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Comments

volfkhat

Amen Brotha!

Complacency is the enemy of Success & Personal Growth.

We must always be on-guard against stagnation.

i've been at my current gig for 576 days now... i plan to be outta here within the next 90.

My coworkers/buddies think i'm joking.... but they just don't know :]

*Onward & Upward*

iBrokeIT

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Do you identify your skills and maximize those or do you try to fill gaps where needed? If so to what degree?

Are you grind through skills just for the sake of having them and being marketable? That sounds like grinding just for the sake of it.

Start by defining what gives you professional satisfaction, what do you define as professional success, and what are your goals. Use those to determine your professional path while also looking at your personal goals.

EANx

I'm a fan of being a generalist with a few areas you focus on. If you're a techie/engineer, once you hit your desired level of generalism, you keep going deeper into your chosen area but as a manager/director, you need to learn about project management and human resources and procurement and ... and ... and...

thomas_

Here’s a few of my thoughts:

-Be deep in 1, 2, or a macimum of three areas. This number will vary with how far along you are in your career. The further along in your career the more chance you have of developing deep expertise in multiple areas. By deep I’m referring to experience troubleshooting, installling, configuring and managing progressively harder and more obscure areas of the tech that a newbie or mid-level person may not have been exposed to. Certification wise these would look like the professional or expert level certs and their equivalents in knowledge and experience. Also, knowing the protocols/technology and not just how a certain vendor implements said protocol/technology

Be wide in a lot of areas. Have an exposure to a lot of technology areas varying from “heard about”, “read about it”, “know the basics”, and possibly “know some intermediate stuff”. This primarily to be well rounded, and more importantly, to let you pivot into different roles that might not be 100% your competency. For example, pick up some cloud stuff and get a new job doing 80% core comptency and 20% cloud. If you wanted your career to be more cloud focused this would intern provide you a pivot point to land a role with progressively more emphasis on your new area of interest.

Think teo steps ahead. Gain skills/experience that will allow you to land a job that will give you the skills/experience to land the next job you want after it.

Money. I don’t work because I like to. Study the siills that are in demand in your area, that have a shortage of applicants, and that you wouldn’t mind working in. The third one is optional, but any two of the three and you are setting yourself up to get paid.

Supervise/manage some people. Work to get int positions where you have a supervisory role. This is a potential way to get paid more. You might find yourself less hands off, but if you’re getting paid more it could make up for it. Senior <insert job title here> a lot of times entails having suboordinates below you. To land those rose roles it can help to have previous supervisory experience.

mgeoffriau

Good thoughts in this thread. I also like to think of it in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

It's important to find a role that utilizes your strengths. If you are in a role that doesn't, then you're wasting untapped value that you could be providing to someone. Given that these areas are already strengths for you, you may perceive improvement in these areas to be slower or more gradual, but it's still good to progress in these areas.

It's also important to find a role that lets you work on improving your weaknesses. I find too many people want roles that completely avoid their weak areas. Such a waste! Your weaknesses are the easiest opportunity for overall improvement. Are you a terrible public speaker? Work on it! Maybe you'll never be a great public speaker, but improving from terrible to even average will round out your skillset and make you much more valuable overall. People who have well rounded skillsets (even if many of those skills are only average) are incredibly valuable because they can function in all kinds of situations -- you don't have to tailor a perfect role or job description for them.

DatabaseHead

Mgeo - great post!

UnixGuy

Interesting post and great replies!!

I have been going for roles that don't necessarily utilise my strength, usually working on things that I haven't touched before...so maximal growth for me ( I think).

The catch was that it was hard for me to get noticed, and I had to deal with characters that tried to downplay what I do...while when you work in your strengths maybe it's easier to shine? I don't know.

Nevertheless, I've been changing jobs every 1~2 years on average for the past 4 years and it has been nothing but constant growth for me (skills wise and money wise)...But!

I think it's worthwhile to stick around for a while (maybe a little bit longer) given the following conditions:
1) There is a genuine chance that I can be promoted to leadership role/responsibility... a genuine chance not a carrot dangled infront of me to keep me going

2) There is a chance to move to a different team and do something different, this is excellent and gives you the chance to learn again as if it's a new job - still looks like good on your CV that you stayed

3) The company actually pays for training..say something like SANS, this is a great opportunity that should keep you longer because you're growing in terms of skills ESPECIALLY if you get to use some of those skills in your job or in a certain work project.

4) You actively try to get involved in new projects, even (and especially) if the projects were with different team. This is a great way to both get noticed and gain new skills.

Apart from that...I think it's necessary to move from job if you want to learn something new...the safe route is as pointed by other posters above where you join a new job that uses some of your existing strengths - I haven't done that, I moved to jobs where almost everything was new to me, and I had to learn it all , it's possible and not as daunting as it might seem