Question: Do you think being a multi-talented or multi-disciplinary professional is a win or loose? Any thoughts?
Replies5
- Hi Çiğdem, thanks for your feedback!Yes, my company is essentially a boutique web development agency as I sometimes work with team members but also as an individual freelance. You make a good point about wanting to see a list of agencies. Unfortunately, most of the time agencies 'white label' my service so I can't feature them. However, some are listed in the testimonials.You are correct that it's often difficult for multidisciplinary people like us to showcase our capabilities and often get overlooked for work because of this. The term for this kind of person in my field used to be 'generalizing specialist' or 'T-shaped' and this used to be a good thing. However, I get the impression that the market now is after specialists.
- @Simon Harris hi, I will discuss your question in two topics. First one is more therotic, the other one is based on more experiences and pratics. In theoric perspective as we are being forced to a multitalented world, because of digitilization I dont understand the reaction of customers who considers you a jack of all trades. As an example when we look at AI world, they can do many things and people appriciate that. Being multi-talented is all about the ability to comprehend and being able to adaptation capacity of new information. It brings flexibility the way you think and makes you a creative person in any disiplin. Those diciplines can be more number based like engineering or conseptual based like art or advertising.AI algorithm is also working like that; it is collecting information, definening it and reproducing it with bonding them with basic relations in a very fast way, and has the ability to link different information. Some people who are multitalented in the way of thinking are like that and the plus which we differentiate from AI's is we are still the ones who can link not alike information in a new context and concept as a creative idea.On the other hand when I look from experiences and observations about work life I see many job explained like 'we are looking for someone who can do everything'. I think the companies and the customers has different values about talents. Some of them looks from a beneficial perspective some of them looks from a complex perspective. As I mentioned at my answer to Anthony maybe explaining how your mind flow works and the benefits of it is the key to be understood more.If I sum up, I see multitalented creative minds as idea travelers and solutions creaters, because they are able to discover many thoughts by traveling in a giant library which is made of knowledge and ideas. And they collect the related ones in a curatorial way and serve. That is the thing which differentiates multi-talented people. I think it is a huge win when it finds where it functions. If not it is a huge loss.I hope I could create a new perspective.
- @Anthony Lopez-Vito Hi Anthony, I have check your website. Frankly my first impression was when I open your website it seem more like a boutique web development agency. Showing yourself as an individual professional with a video introduction might represent you more alive. Sorry if I am using weird words while try to explain my thoughts as I am not a native. As you open your website with the sentence 'Digital agencies hire me for complex, data-heavy web projects and business-critical migrations for ecommerce platforms including Drupal and WordPress.' when I wear the role of a customer I have the feeling like I would like o see the list of agencies you have worked with just to have a little information. But maybe in web development area it is not preferred to be shared.On the other hand it is good to have a wide range of talent related to your profession as it requires very technical knowledge, it is good to be in different cases to be able solve different problems. Positioning yourself as a case solutioner can be a very effective and I see that you present yourself in this way. As a multitalented and multi-disipliner person I sometimes have difficulties showing my capabilities to potential customers because they dont recognize and link your different capabilities easily. It is sad that they look for simple information about you. So as they can not define you easily they just pass to another candidate who looks more definable. I hope I could give efficient answers about your question. :)
- It's a win if you're able to specialise in a few of those talents and pitch accordingly. However, as Simon Harris replied, it can work against you as many industries right now are hyper-specialised. Clients often look for people with a lot of experience in a particular area.In the web and digital media industry, you need to have quite a broad range of skills. However, general 'web design' is an easy on-ramp so there's lots of competition and you can't make it if you don't find a niche.For example, I offer web development services but that means I'll be competing with everyone from students working part-time to global media agencies. I therefore have a very specialised offering, which is providing Content Management System migration consultantancy for media agencies who don't have this skill in-house. (This is very niche!)Nevertheless, my broad experience in the industry means I can find a role in almost any web project, whether that's as a project manager, developer, database architect, data engineer or busines process analyst.Here's how I pitch myself. Happy to receive feedback for improvements.https://anothercoffee.net
- Hi!Its an interesting question and one which we consider regularly here at Observatory. We are a multi-talented / multi-disciplinary company which for our existing clients is a huge benefit; they can come to us with a range of different projects knowing that we have the skills and experience to deliver their requirements.However when seeking new clients, we have found that it can work against us; they have a specific project in mind and are looking for a specialist in that particular area of expertise. I'm very confident that we are not a 'Jack of all trades' company, but new clients can think otherwise and as such be put off working with us.Hope this helps. Would be happy to disucss it in more detail.CheersSimon
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