Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your IT Career Skills

I believe that to become an agile software developer that you need to move away from being a narrowly focused specialist to become more along the lines of what I like to call a generalizing specialist. A generalizing specialist is someone with one or more technical specialties who actively seeks to gain new skills in both their existing specialties as well as in other areas, including both technical and domain areas. When you get your first job as an IT professional it is often in the role of a junior programmer or junior DBA. You will initially focus on becoming good at that role, and if you’re lucky your organization will send you on training courses to pick up advanced skills in your specialty. Once you’re adept at that specialty, or even when you’ve just reached the point of being comfortable at it, it is time to expand your horizons and learn new skills in different aspects of the software lifecycle and in your relevant business domain. When you do this you evolve from being a specialist to being a generalizing specialist. Generalizing specialists are often referred to as craftspeople or even "renaissance developers".

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