I-Shaped and T-Shaped Skills

[icecream-guy]

interesting blog from Ivan Pepelnjak this morning on career advice

http://blog.ipspace.net/2015/05/on-i-shaped-and-t-shaped-skills.html

[Reggle]

Yeah, read it. Great post. Makes you think.
Stil, I prefer specialisation. You just have to regularly balance it with some time learning additional skills when you have the chance.

[dlots]

Yeah, the majority of IT is probably going to be that T shaped specalist/Generalist stuff.  However the true specialist will always be needed, and I personally find it more fun as it gets me out of the day to day boring stuff.  The generalist IMO is often the "At work IT guy" who knows what he needs to get a job, goes home, and doesn't touch a PC till he has to go to work again. Some times that's not the case, but often I find that it is.

[deanwebb]

The second graph looked very naughty. Informative, but very reminiscent of gentleman's meat and two veg. 

But he is right. A variant would be H or M shaped skills, implying a few small peaks above a solid core area.

[Nerm]

I agree with specializing but not to the extreme where that is literally the only thing you know. A person should specialize but should still have a general functional knowledge of their industry as a whole. For example just as one might specialize in network engineering he/she should still have enough general knowledge of the industry to know how to replace the hard drive in their computer if it dies or understand how an operating system works. In comparison it is like a doctor that specializes in brain surgery he/she is still going to have fundamental knowledge of medicine and the medical industry. They may specialize in brain surgery but they could also walk into a local practice and read a chart for a patient in for knee surgery or know how to diagnose high blood pressure. Does this make sense or am I just rambling at this point? lol

[Otanx]

Nope, I follow you, and I agree. The better you understand the applications that ride over the network the better you can design, and engineer the network to meet those needs.

-Otanx