At what point in your career should you leave being a jack-of-all-trades and acquire a specialty?
Pay Your Dues
At what point in your career should you leave being a jack-of-all-trades and acquire a specialty?
- By Greg Neilson
- March 01, 2000
I’m an MCP working toward my MCSE (two exams left),
with three years in the field. I was hired into the company
I work for with little experience; my firm has allowed
me to gain knowledge in a variety of areas. In a given
day I could do anything—from rearranging a PC in a cubicle,
to replacing a hardware component on a client PC, to setting
up an NT server. This is the first job I’ve had in this
field and I’m beginning to wonder if my job responsibilities
aren’t spread a little thin. Is this the way most of us
spend our days? Are there jobs that focus on a more specialized
area in which you can become an “expert?” I feel like
a “Jack of all trades but a master of none.” Is the certification
I’m working so hard for being put to good use?
—Scott Russell, MCP
PC/Network Specialist
Jacksonville, Florida
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Scott, I’m afraid that I pretty much agree with everything
Steve (a.k.a. “The Old Geezer”) says. However, there are
a few areas I’d like to explore further.
It sounds like you’ve been exposed to many aspects of
IT support over three years, which is a great thing. That
broad knowledge and experience is going to be extremely
useful for your future IT career, and isn’t something
you can learn simply by reading a book or taking a class.
Completing your MCSE will be useful in complementing
your practical experience with some background theory,
but that alone is no longer the ticket to fame and fortune
that it may have been in the recent past. Nowadays, employers
pretty much expect that as a competent working professional
you’ll be certified. Instead, they’re much more interested
in what you’ve actually done with the technology and learned
along the way. That is what makes you truly valuable.
Also, don’t forget that the certification exams cover
the minimum acceptable level of skills for Microsoft to
deem that you know the product. It doesn’t make anyone
an expert. You’ve probably worked on projects in which
you had to learn the hard way how products really work
and what they do and don’t do. Often, that goes far beyond
the level of coverage expected in the exams.
One last point: I detect a tone within your question
that perhaps some of your current work assignments may
be beneath you. I’m afraid that even if you were promoted
tomorrow to a senior position, you’ll always encounter
tasks that you might well consider beneath you, but that
you must do for the sake of the business. You just have
to grin and do them, then get back to more challenging
work when you can. Also, don’t forget that you will need
to demonstrate mastery of your current work assignments
before you will be asked to handle anything more demanding.
Sometimes I wonder if the high pay in IT relative to
other fields is because of the not-so-nice tasks we all
have to do occasionally. To give you an example, a few
years ago I was team lead for a third-level network support
team. I had some smart people working for me, and the
team was half permanent staff and half contractors. As
you would expect, much of our time was spent fixing critical
network problems (servers crashes and so forth). But from
time to time, we were called upon to perform simple tasks
that were insignificant technically but important politically—say,
fixing a desktop problem for the client’s senior management.
This ensured that the problem was fixed (since we were
well over-qualified for those sorts of tasks, of course)
and also that it was done quickly. We on the team just
accepted this as part of the job. However, I hired a new
contractor who considered himself a Windows NT/NetWare
expert, and in response to an urgent client request, I
needed him to travel to the client site and use Traveling
Software’s LapLink to copy some files from one client
PC to another. After some convincing, he grudgingly went.
I wasn’t delighted with his attitude, but what surprised
me was the anger among the rest of the team that someone
considered himself above the rest of us. Not surprisingly,
this person lasted only two weeks.
I’m not trying to compare you to that contractor, but
I am warning you to be careful about your attitude. That
can be as important an asset as any technical tool you’ll
ever add to your toolbelt.
About the Author
Greg Neilson, MCSE+Internet, MCNE, PCLP, is a Contributing Editor for MCP Magazine and a Professional Development Manager for a large IT services firm in Australia. He’s the author of Lotus Domino Administration in a Nutshell (O’Reilly and Associates, ISBN 1565927176).