• Research reveals that building a broader spread of skills and expertise might not always lead to greater professional development
• With wider skills and focus comes a risk of overlooking the specifics, resulting in a loss of accuracy
• Instead, focusing on key skills and sectors and enhancing capabilities within them often provides the best route to success  

According to the most recent Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), 44% of workers skills will be “disrupted” over the next five years.

The report, which comprises the experiences of over 11 million workers across 27 industries and economies, shares a compelling forecast of how we can expect our professional lives to evolve. And, unsurprisingly, the rate of that evolution is perhaps broader and faster than we’ve ever known it.

Technology, the report states, continue to be a key driver of business transformation, with 85% of responding organisations having introduced new tools and capabilities in recent years, as will the need to better commit to Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) standards to ensure business practices can both bring profit and help protect the planet.

To accomplish this, not only are existing roles being adapted to keep pace, but entirely new job roles are being created as others fall into obscurity. Creative thinkers, AI gurus and socio-emotional experts are dominating becoming as – if not more – important to companies as those with more practical, perhaps traditional skills.

To put it plainly, to remain employable and successful, workers are under more pressure than ever to keep learning, and adding to their skillsets.

It’s an attitude shared by employment experts and career coaches too – never stop learning. Challenge yourself, embrace new skills and become adaptable.

But simply seeking to widen your capabilities is no guarantee of continued career success. In fact, research from Durham University Business School shows that trying to master it all can actually have the opposite effect.

Employees aiming to diversify their skillsets will only see an improvement in their performance if they work to become experts in the new field they branch out into, the study reveals – a finding which is perhaps understandable. However the study goes on to show that employees will only see that investment pay off if they also limit how many new fields they focus on.

Furthermore, if employees branch out into developing a new skill but do not attain expert levels of capability, they are likely to see their personal performance drop not just in those newer areas but across the board.

Selective expertise

The study, undertaken by Dr Guanming He, alongside Yun Sun from Bayes Business School and April Zhichao Li from the University of Exeter Business School, took focus on the finance sector. The researchers sought to establish whether financial analysts could perform better by limiting their focus – concentrating on just one industry or sector, or whether pursuing wider focuses could result in a positive impact on their performance.

Dr He and his colleagues analysed the quality of thousands of forecasts, assessing accuracy, informativeness and timeliness, going on to link these qualities to the number of industries each analyst worked across, and their experience.

The findings revealed that trying to encompass too much, or spreading themselves too thin, turned out to have damaging consequences.

Understandably, those financial analysts who were true experts in their specific field or industry were much more accurate and effective in their forecasts than those who are not. But, the more fields or sectors that a financial analyst diversified to, the less accurate and effective their forecasts became.

Whilst amassing a wider net of knowledge and know-how is certainly seen as desirable by both employers and employees alike, the study reveals a very real danger to be found in trying to do too much. “When clients are looking to work with a financial analyst, it’s imperative for them that the analyst is able to offer the most accurate forecasts,” says Dr He.

A narrow, but deeper skillset

Whilst it’s certainly tempting to be able to list multiple capabilities, interests and knowledge bases when trying to gain the next step up the career ladder, for those roles where accuracy is absolutely vital, being selective is perhaps the better way to get ahead. “An analyst who focuses on a small number of industries is more likely to have expertise in that field,” Dr He continues. “It’s safe to say that, when it comes to analysts, becoming a master of a few trades is better than a jack of all.”

So if you’re limiting how much you can do, how can you keep your career progress high? For analysts, the research suggests, making a greater effort to dig deeper in those fields where they are already established is the way to set themselves apart from their peers. Fostering deeper industry knowledge and expertise which is conducive to improving their forecast quality in those specific focus areas is the best way to advance their career development.

In the study, this perspective rang true for investors. If seeking analyst reports to guide investment decision-making, investors would find it more beneficial, the researchers say, to refer to the forecasts issued by industry-focused analysts.

There is food for thought here for employers too. If seeking a particular skillset to add to an organisation, it pays to focus on how well a potential employee might be able to perform specific key duties, rather than being swayed by how many additional extras they might bring with them.

Whilst diversifying workloads and finding staff who can spread their knowledge across a number of different fields is a tempting prospect – especially for those looking to do a lot with very little resource, to ensure staff performance, and therefore returns, remain high it is always better to seek a specialist.

And for those entering the workforce? It is true that we should never stop learning, but remembering that nobody can “do it all” and instead focusing on what they already do exceptionally well may bring more opportunity than you’d think.

By, Kerry Ruffle

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