I am in New Zealand today having come across the Tasmin Sea from Australia last night. I am meeting with clients and friends, doing some speaking, researching employment and development trends, running a workshop and listening carefully to what ordinary people are saying about the job market.
What I am hearing is that employers are looking for a different kind of candidate than they were even six months ago. Managers and even HR leaders seem a bit surprised that things have changed so fast which also underlines the need for all of us to be agile and flexible.
What employers want are to reduce the number of employees and find people that have multiple skills and can work cross-functionality. Many specialist jobs are being outsourced or handed off to consultants. In other words – inside many organizations the generalist is back. However, over the past decade employers have stocked up on highly skilled specialists whose narrow focus limits their ability to be redeployed.
Interest is rising in how to accelerate learning, increase skills and select people for agility. Leadership development is gaining in interest and a new type of leadership development program is emerging. I will blog about that later. Job descriptions are being broadened and people who have worked in several different poisitions and organizations are now more highly sought after.
The pendulum swings and once again the jack-of-all trades is in demand.
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Hi..we are following eachother on twitter!
good point in this article. I can see how it can be better for employers to hire jack-of-all-trades if they are exceptionally good acorss the board…but I think there will always be a need for pure experts in select fields…too many average experts might be costly..just my thoughts!
Stuart Stirling
My blog about Start An Internet Biz
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This begs the question, is this a knee jerk reaction to bad economies and reductions in workforce or an actual trend? I am not convinced that, even if this is the re-emergence of generalists, that it is the right move. The fact remains that the vast majority of companies are ill equipped and, I might argue, not even capable of delivering the quality of cross functional training, leadership development and organizational effectiveness to make the return to generalist an effective and efficient option. Let’s face it, when the generalist model was in place in its previous iteration it essentially was a jack of all trades master of none that led to a whole lot of nothing getting done – especially in HR.
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