Beat the Recession by Moving Up the Value Chain: Why It’s No Longer a Choice

 This raises a question: Over time, do we ourselves define our jobs more narrowly? As you succeed in your job, do you tend to retreat into a comfort zone? Do you try to do mostly the things that you’re good at and you enjoy doing?

Other questions concerning the operational nature of jobs

There are other issues that need to be discussed in order to fully determine if your job is operational in nature. And these are described in detail in my eBook

Specializing – now a key step

One of the most paradoxical aspects of moving up the value chain is the need to specialise. Intuition would seem to suggest that if you want to broaden your skills you should definitely NOT specialise. And yet, my findings are that a specialist is far better positioned to acquire impressive new skills than an all-rounder. The specialist seems better equipped to get past what I call the ‘learning brick wall’. The latter is the seemingly insurmountable barrier we all reach when learning something new, such as a foreign language. The temptation is strong to give up, but the specialist has tools for dealing with the ‘learning brick wall’.

The term I use in my eBook for such a specialist is: a specialized generalist. This is someone who has a clearly defined point of contact with the global knowledge pool. In other words, the specialist can focus on rapid knowledge learning and skills acquisition in a manner that is far more difficult (if indeed possible) for the non-specialist.

 Becoming a specialist involves some important analysis of your job, your skills, and your ambitions. The relevant issues are fully discussed in my eBook, but one key element of specializing is fairly low-tech: reading.

The importance of a reading plan

Nowadays many people are reluctant to read widely. It’s a sad paradox that reading has become something of a chore and somehow incompatible with these electronic times. However, it’s precisely now that we should all should be stepping up our reading, because there is unprecedented instant access to top-quality information. Reading provides one of the most important keys to moving up the value chain.

So, what about some tools for learning when you’re working?

Tools for learning

Getting it wrong is probably the single most important learning tool in existence! Most employers frown on people who make mistakes. Indeed, many employers will actively censure employees who make mistakes. I believe this approach is itself a mistake – we all learn by making mistakes.

 Indeed, children ‘use’ mistakes without question: just watch the way children who don’t speak the same language can rapidly learn to communicate with each other using pictures and simple words. Put a group of adults who don’t share a language in a room together and it’s likely there won’t be a lot of communication. We learn to become embarrassed at getting language wrong even if it means not communicating.

The importance and value of mistakes is often overlooked and I discuss it in more detail in my eBook.

Can you become the best in one small area?

One aspect of specialisation is the possibility of carving out a niche for yourself. It might be surprising to learn that this is generally what the most successful individuals do. They pick an area that interests few people and they work hard to become the best at it. What kind of area do I mean? It might be something as (notionally) low-tech as dry cleaning or scrap metal or cement production. But, really successful individuals get to know pretty much everything about their area. This approach can also be applied on a smaller scale in your job. We can all learn from this single-minded approach and this topic is also explored in my eBook.