Specialise or broad knowledge

[MattDLEA]

Just wondering what people think about this?

 

Is it better to specialise in one area, if so what would you recommend? or have a shallower knowledge of lots of things?

Mainly thinking of career wise?

[Norphy]

It all depends on the environment that you want to work in. The bigger the organisation, the more likely it is that you'll need specialisation as every little thing is going to be compartmentalised. I've just started working for a university, they have a desktop team, a systems/Unix team, a Windows team, a networking team and more besides. If you want to work in a big organisation, you'll have to specialise. If you don't want to work in a big organisation, you'll need to have a broader knowledge as you'll need to do everything.

 

As for recommendations of what to specialise in, specialise in something in which you're interested. Otherwise you will have a very miserable working life.

[hardtailstar]

as what @Norphy said.

 

If you are going to specialize then go for something you enjoy.

 

I am looking at app development, I have a small knowledge now but I am hoping to get better in the next year or two.

[AMLinington]

I think it depends on what you want from your career. The bonus to having broad, but shallow knowledge is that it makes you more versatile and so the RANGE of jobs available to you is larger, but the career prospects are limited. Deep, but narrow knowledge means you are competing against a smaller pool but the pressure is greater because if you are only good at limited things you need to be REALLY good. But it does have the potential to take you far. But you'll always need to stay on the top of your game.

 

Personally, I prefer broad but shallow. That's my personal preference and my own strengths lie in capitalising on my versatility. But I think it depends what you want for yourself.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

As People have mentioned above it all depends on what you are doing and where you see your career going. I think it is always worth having a specialism but also keeping a broad knowledge of things will always help. My specialism is in AV but I have to have a fairly broad knowledge of IT/servers/networking etc.

[rich_tech]

Specialising is good if your in a large organisation and make sure its something that is of interest as already pointed out (I am moving slowly away from Wintel and towards Networking here, though a school can really expect you to be quite general in your knowledge I find where you will cover lots of technologies, desktops, servers and networks tend to be the base of skills you need in all education IT I find and you can then build accordingly.

[FN-GM]

Both is good. In our place we all have a broad knowledge but each person has (or will have) a specific specialist area. For example mine is Networking, I am doing my CCNP. Someone else will be doing a MSCE.

[localzuk]

Specialise in being a generalist...

[jinnantonnixx]

To misquote Zimon, "A specialist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing."

 

Unless you're in a field where you can pick and choose what you work on, I think the question is moot. You have to know enough about a range of technologies to get the job done. If your job requires knowledge of certain areas, you must know these areas with enough depth to be effective. So that's your generalist, and there's no way of avoiding this.

 

The great risk of specialisation is that your specialism can become redundant or obsolete overnight. I'm glad I didn't specialise in Silverlight.

 

IMO the best approach is to be adaptive. Identify keystone products. For instance, I saw SIMS back in the '90s and thought it looked important enough to focus on, so I got to know it fairly well. I got into SQL and server technologies. I could see an emergence of turnkey solutions which were based on Linux, so I got familiar with Linux. It hasn't been the tsunami I was expecting, but it's still stood me in good stead.

Edited November 3, 2015 by jinnantonnixx

[pcstru]

Is it better to specialise in one area, if so what would you recommend? or have a shallower knowledge of lots of things?

Mainly thinking of career wise?

Without a better statement of the problem, there is no solution. Each choice has its pros and cons.

 

If you think about what you want to be doing in 5 years, 10 years, 25 years - that should help you focus in on what you then need to do to achieve that or, if you really can't either think what those goals might be or you can't stand to be so constrained and want flexibility, that itself might suggest one approach would be better.

[CyberNerd]

Specialising and competing for jobs in a partticular area usually requires a lot of expensive and continual re-training in the specific vendors products.

[PotNoodleTech]

Generally, if you want to work in a school, or small business. Jack of all trades works.

 

Generally, if you want to work in a college, uni, academy, or medium to large business, specialise is the only way. They won't be interested a jack of all trades, they will want specifics, a Windows Server Guru, or a Cisco Network Guru, etc.

 

I would say - be a jack of all trades, but also specialise in the thing you enjoy most, if that's for example windows server, then go for the vendor specific qualifications. If you prefer networks, hit cisco training up.

[MattDLEA]

Here's the deal. I have my own company that's just me. My background is web design with a bit of programming. Then I got into e-learning (Fronter) and creating on-line courses for students. After getting made redundant I set up on my own and look after a few primary schools and do some occasional websites.

See the problem I have or I think I have is I can keep things ticking over nicely in a primary school, install a simple network and keep pc's running. Other stuff I would have to look up but feel confident in. But if you were to come to me and say hey set up a exchange server or SCCM or something like that I wouldnt have a clue without lots of Googling, even DNS issues confuse me.

Same with the web design I could knock up websites for small businesses and schools etc wordpress/html/css. But anything more complicated then I would be found out.

So at the moment I feel like I can do what I'm required to do.

 

However I feel that I am slipping between the cracks and as my week is split in two half networks and the other half working from home / web. I don't know what to do. I have tried getting more schools but nothing came of that. Its knowing where to focus. At the moment I'm making ends meet and to be fair its not a bad income for the hours I work, but could just do to be doing more

[Arreks]

I specialise in complaining, if that counts. I've also got a broad knowledge of sarcasm too though.

[john]

Where I work we have to be specialists in everything, however we all have our stronger areas and people come to the person with that info for help and we take tasks and jobs in those areas based on that but we all share skills and experiences, for example when I started I hadn't really done anything with VMware and now I know lots thanks to my great colleagues sharing skills and experiences

[JoeBloggs]

If you specialize and get in a very large company you can earn loads! (or so it seems from this side)

 

I work for an SME so the IT team is that similar size of the School, although we have invested heavily in infrastructure to keep the team down to a minimum.

 

For me I like doing a bit of everything as it keeps me more interested and might get bored specializing doing the same things day in day out!