I think you’re right. My view is probably stronger than this. I’ll focus on some reasons in favour of specialisation.
I think your ability to carry out a role keeps increasing for several years, but the rate on improvement presumably goes tapers off with time. However, the relationship between skill in a role and your impact is less clear. It seems plausible that there could be threshold effects and the like, such that even though your skill doesn’t keep increasing at the same rate, the impact you have in the role could keep increasing at the same or an even higher rate. This seems for example to be the case with research. It’s much better to produce the very best piece on one topic than to produce 5 mediocre pieces on different topics. You could imagine that the same thing happens with organisations.
One important consideration—especially early in your career—is how staying in one role for a long time affects your career capital. The fewer competitive organisations there are in the space where you’re aiming to build career capital and the narrower the career capital you want to build (e.g. because you are aiming to work on a particular cause or in a particular type of role), the less frequently changing roles makes sense.
There’s also the consideration of what happens when we coordinate. In the ideal scenario, more coordination in terms of careers should mean people try to build more narrow career capital, which means that they’d hop around less between different roles. I liked this post by Denise Melchin from a while back on this topic.
It’s also plausible that you get a lot of the gains from specialisation not from staying in the same role, but primarily in staying in the same field or in the same organisation. And so, you can have your growth and still get the gains from specialisation by staying in the same org or field but growing your responsibilities (this can also be within one and the same role).
The fewer competitive organisations there are in the space where you’re aiming to build career capital and the narrower the career capital you want to build (e.g. because you’re unsure about cause prior or because the roles you’re aiming at require wide skillsets), the less frequently changing roles makes sense.
Is this a typo? I expect uncertainty about cause prio and requirements of wide skillsets to favor less narrow career capital (and increased benefits of changing roles), not narrower career capital.
Thanks for the question, Lukas.
I think you’re right. My view is probably stronger than this. I’ll focus on some reasons in favour of specialisation.
I think your ability to carry out a role keeps increasing for several years, but the rate on improvement presumably goes tapers off with time. However, the relationship between skill in a role and your impact is less clear. It seems plausible that there could be threshold effects and the like, such that even though your skill doesn’t keep increasing at the same rate, the impact you have in the role could keep increasing at the same or an even higher rate. This seems for example to be the case with research. It’s much better to produce the very best piece on one topic than to produce 5 mediocre pieces on different topics. You could imagine that the same thing happens with organisations.
One important consideration—especially early in your career—is how staying in one role for a long time affects your career capital. The fewer competitive organisations there are in the space where you’re aiming to build career capital and the narrower the career capital you want to build (e.g. because you are aiming to work on a particular cause or in a particular type of role), the less frequently changing roles makes sense.
There’s also the consideration of what happens when we coordinate. In the ideal scenario, more coordination in terms of careers should mean people try to build more narrow career capital, which means that they’d hop around less between different roles. I liked this post by Denise Melchin from a while back on this topic.
It’s also plausible that you get a lot of the gains from specialisation not from staying in the same role, but primarily in staying in the same field or in the same organisation. And so, you can have your growth and still get the gains from specialisation by staying in the same org or field but growing your responsibilities (this can also be within one and the same role).
Thanks, that’s helpful.
Is this a typo? I expect uncertainty about cause prio and requirements of wide skillsets to favor less narrow career capital (and increased benefits of changing roles), not narrower career capital.
It is indeed! Editing the comment. Thanks!