When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line concept to the manufacturing world in 1913, it was a eureka moment for many business owners.
By taking complex tasks and breaking them down into smaller chunks owned by specific workers, Ford massively improved productivity and efficiency across his operations and created a highly specialized workforce that could produce output at breathtaking speed.
Across the early part of the 21st century, we’ve seen a similar revolution in the knowledge-work domain.
All-purpose software developers have been replaced by designers, programming language experts, QA engineers, and DevOps engineers. You have copywriters, social media managers, and email marketers in the marketing function. And similar atomization can be seen across almost every other major corporate function.
In their article “The Age of Hyperspecialization,” authors Tom Mason, Robert Laubacher, and Tammy Johns argue that breaking work down into several specialized elements allows knowledge workers to produce higher-quality work more quickly and cost-effectively.
Specialist skills may not be as valuable in the long-term
Arguing against these benefits is difficult, but they come with real tradeoffs. We live in an era of rapid technological acceleration. Systems, platforms, and hardware we treat as workplace essentials today might be consigned to the recycle bin tomorrow (think fax machines, wired landlines, or legacy programming languages like COBOL).
Employees whose expertise is tied to specific technology can quickly find themselves surplus to requirements as organizations invest in new applications and tools. A Gallup survey from earlier this year showed that 22% percent of U.S. workers are worried about tech making their jobs obsolete, more than at any other point in history.
These issues are only likely to be exacerbated with the rise of generative AI tools, which are increasingly encroaching upon knowledge-intensive fields like software development, data science, and healthcare.
From the viewpoint of employers, another issue to consider is the capacity for innovation amongst specialized workforces. When your best employees are asked to work on only role-related tasks, they have few opportunities to gain new insights and skills outside of their purview. This lack of perspective often leads to a rigid mindset with little room for creativity or agility.
Kevin Dunbar, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, demonstrated this phenomenon in his paper, “How scientists think: On-line creativity and conceptual change in science”.
The analysis showed that the research labs most renowned for innovation and scientific breakthroughs employed a diverse roster of scientists. These labs could pull insights from various disciplines to solve problems, whereas more specialized labs tended to see these scenarios through a narrow lens.
The rise of generalists
Recent data from TestGorilla’s annual State of Skills-based Hiring Report shows that a majority of employers (88.3%) prioritize candidates with strong soft skills in their recruitment process. A further 91% said that these attributes are more important now than five years ago.
Although there is still a place at the table for industry veterans with refined technical skills, a much broader set of transferable skills is required to navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity of the modern business landscape.
Candidates are well aware of this volatility. Very few follow a traditional career path in which they progress linearly in a specific field. Instead, most individuals will switch roles and industries multiple times across their lifetime, learning new skills in different areas as they go along. Indeed, over 50% of employees have moved from one department to another or from one role to another over the past year.
For these generalists, characteristics such as creative problem-solving, cross-functional collaboration, communication, and adaptability are more important than industry-specific technical skills. Those with the right attributes can be essential to an organization’s success. A Harvard Business Review survey of over 17,000 CEOs shows that over 90% of C-suite leaders fall into this category.
How do you find the right generalists for the role?
In the past, generalists were deployed to plug gaps that were outside the scope of specialist talents, such as administrative assistants, junior HR employees, and office managers. Today, these individuals are being used to fill skills shortages in highly technical areas like product management, UX design, marketing, and even engineering.
Of course, hiring managers still need to ensure the chosen candidate possesses relevant transferable skills and competencies to be able to perform in the role.
This is why skills-based hiring is so important. While resumes will show you an applicant’s past education and experience, they do a much poorer job of predicting candidates’ future performance. By screening individuals for their cognitive abilities, hard skills, soft skills, and attitude, you will get a much clearer picture of their capabilities and be able to identify generalists who can come in and immediately contribute to your organization’s goals.
Guest writer
