Select the Right Skills to Improve

ontinuous learning

is key to maintaining your professional skills, and as with pursuing any goal it helps to have a plan. In this case a professional development plan. When creating your development plan it is important to select the right skills to focus on. When selecting skills to train ask the following questions.

Strengths or Weaknesses?

• Reasons to focus on strengths
  • You can gain energy from building strengths while fixing weaknesses can drain energy and enthusiasm.
  • Groups naturally divide tasks and the team can gain efficiency if each member specializes on their strengths.
• Reasons to focus on weaknesses
  • gives you a more flexible toolkit
  • over-specialization can make you a bottleneck within the team
• Reasons to balance focus between strengths and weaknesses
  • combining a broad base of skills with a few specialisations is called T-shaped (one specialisation+broad-base) or π-shaped (two specialisations+broad-base) skillsets and is advocated by many thought leaders and recruiters.
• Reasons to creatively apply a strength to tasks you are weak in.
  • Dr. Martin Seligman the positive psychology guru gives an example of a student who dreaded the long walk home every night from the library. He used his humor and playfulness to overcome his fear and turn the walk into a source of joy.
• Test your strengths
• Via Survey

Task or People Skills?

• What's more important, hard skills or soft skills?
• Both are important as almost all jobs require you both to complete tasks and work with other people.

Skills for Your Current Role, or Next Role?

• First you need to master your current role, but after a certain level of competency you need to prepare for the future and broaden your skill base.
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Specific vs General Skills, Concrete vs Abstract?

I have already mentioned balancing specific skills and general skills with T-shaped or π-shaped skillsets. Specific skills tend to be more practical and concrete while general skills tend to be more theoretical and abstract. The theoretical and abstract ideas that you picked up while mastering concrete skills can be a springboard to launch yourself sideways into related technologies or a related field.

Examples:

• Concrete skills like a language or framework that work on a specific platform or situation.
• Semi-Abstract skills like Design Patterns or SOLID principles that work on a class of platforms or situations.
• Abstract skills like problem solving strategies such as Alternating Divergent and Convergent Thinking or the TRIZ framework that work in almost any situation.

Concrete skills are easier to learn and it is easier to test whether you have learnt them correctly. However it is harder re-use these skills in different situations. They often have narrower applicability. Also unless you pair concrete skills with semi-abstract skills it can sometimes be difficult to do deep learning, depending on how much theory comes bundled with the concrete skills. Abstract skills are fuzzier and can be harder to learn however they are easier to apply to widely different situations.

The Common Strategy May Not be the Best Strategy

I have coached and mentored many developers and most developers focus on narrow technical skills and place a strong emphasis on eliminating weaknesses. This is a reasonably good strategy for a beginner. However what is suitable at one stage of your career will not necessarily help you at a latter stage. I see many experience people not living up to their potential because they fail to widen and broaden the sources of their inspiration.