Specialisms: Expected, required or irrelevant?

[Lovely]

Do you favour:





a) A specialised, narrow but in-depth skill-set focusing on one particular sub-discipline (e.g., Bill Gates, a technical expert)



or



<img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... >/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':o' /> A non-specific, less in-depth, multi-discipline engineering skill-set (i.e., a jack of all trades, master of none, e.g. Leonardo Da Vinci).





For the gainfully employed crowd: What type are you?



For the student crowd: Do you think it's worth specializing in university or even in high- and middle-school (e.g., some schools offer concentration programs) or would you opt to pursue a general education?



Which type would you say it is best to be in this day and age (and into the future)? Do you think a specialism is expected, necessary or not so important?

[BeForJess]

I tend to think that something too specific can keep you from finding a position, if the chosen career suddenly isn't so hot, someone just starting out in it will have a hard time finding work. That is where my hudband is at, he had a job doing what he went to school for but since he was the last hired, he was the first laid off when the company took a downturn due to the state of the economy. Now he still can't find anything in his field because there are so many others with the same skills as him but more experience looking for the same positions.



Rather than go to college not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I studied what I liked and advanced in my career without needing school. And now I make quite a bit more money than a lot of my friends who went to college and now have degrees but no jobs. Go figure.



I'm the manager of a Shell gas station & convenience store. I work ridiculous hours, but I love what I do and I am happy with my career. I also have job security, and a skill set that, should I ever choose to go elsewhere, would loan itself to other higher up office or retail jobs.

[Pflaume]

Pastry chef/cake decorator, which sucks right now. It's such a luxury field that jobs are especially rare in this economy, and pay is abysmal. The latter has always been the case, though. I know really talented people who can't find unpaid internships. Seriously.



I think a resume filled with management experience, like BeForJess, is a good bet now. My dad has this also-- no specific trade, but tons of management experience, and he can always find work. I, however, am in the same boat as her husband.

[ostrich]

It really depends on what you're specialized in... there's no point in being specialized in something where demand tends to be low. However, some specializations (e.g., law) tend to be more stable in terms of demand, and specializing in that may not be as detrimental as some people here believe.



On the other hand, being a "master of none" may mean that for whatever job you're looking for, there will be: (1) lots of competition, and/or (2) somebody who is specialized and therefore more qualified than you are. I figure that either of those become moot points with more experience.



As a student, I find that people who are generalized end up having no clear idea as to what exactly they want to do (i.e., no clear idea as to what they realistically want to do), and they end up wasting time or not being able to settle on a job after they graduate.



In conclusion, I believe that specialization is usually beneficial, depending on what you're specialized in. Usually, there are at least some transferable skills gained from specialized studying. There are a lot of other factors involved, however (e.g., how much job experience you have, personality, etc.), and specialization in and of itself may not find you any decent job.

[perfectblue]

I'm a bit torn on the subject really. My degree was semi specialised, but still had quite a lot of choice as far as modules you could take.

Since finishing university i'm doing something unrelated to my degree, but whether I could have gotten the same job if I hadn't gone to university I don't know.

I think quite often qualifications just serve to make someone take notice of your application to start with, they don't pay much attention to once you get past that stage. In my experience anyway.

[pamacii]

My Response: A rounded, liberal arts education only ever hurt people with 3-4 labs a week...

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.



-Robert A. Heinlein

As far as working goes, I have two jobs, both of which are computer-related customer-service jobs. I think that focusing too much in a particular area hurt employees as well as employers. I think that in most cases, the most important thing is the ability and willingness to learn.

I used to work as a mechanic's assistant. I didn't know crap about cars when I started, and I don't know now, either, but I learned to do what I needed to do, very often whenever I needed to. The important thing was not that I knew how to do everything when I started, but that I was willing to learn how to do my job.

The same is true for many technical jobs, where the ability to think and process is more important than knowing one thing well. As my A+ prep teacher in high school said, "In the real world, what is important is not that you know all the information, but that you know where to find it." (after a particularly memorization-heavy lesson on bios beep codes)

[Lovely]

I'm personally sold on a well-rounded education. I signed up for a B.A. Biology because I'm interested in a wide breadth of academic subjects: languages, psychology, art history, writing, literature, math, logic, philosophy, and of course, biology. My degree lets me take advantage of my time as a student to study the things that interest me -- like a kid in a candy store -- while giving me a "marketable" degree. Now, the big problem is that I don't have a good idea of which career path I want to take. Having a point of focus for your ambitions is a major perk of being a specialist.

[AEUGNewtype]

I think the general idea in any college education is to get a lot of rounding to it, unless you're in something like math or computers that are very finite and immalleable in their nature. With just about any other kind of degree I can think of, most institutions try to implement a well-rounded course load. I specialized in Marketing for my Bachelor's degree, but I had to run through a plethora of English, psychology, math, and philosophy courses outside of the obvious, more business-oriented ones, as well as the ones that pertained to my minor, being Humanities, so I also ran through every music, film, literature, and arts classes the school had to offer in my 4 year span.



When you mention a "marketable" degree, unfortunately in the job market right now, there's no such standard unless you're someone who's had at least couple years of experience in your respective field and if you've picked a field that isn't over-populated right now. I've been dealing with this for about 3 years now since I graduated. I even had an internship that was dead on with the course of my degree before leaving college, still, no one wanted to give me the chance to gain some experience. Everyone says they wanted "more experience" when no one is willing to hire you on at entry-level to give you said experience.



It feels like nowadays no one even really puts too much value into your education when considering you for a job. Experience and how you do in the interview is probably about 90% of their decision, it seems. I'm not an HR person right now, so I can't say for sure, but after having a lot of experience in trying to get a job, I've picked up some consistencies.