Is being a ‘Jack of all trades’ the next best thing?
‘Jack of all trades, master of none’
Who hates that phrase?
I have a love – hate relationship with it – it’s a bit like Marmite for me.
For a long time, I let the ‘master of none’ shadow the value that I can bring. But now, I can officially say that I am owning it.
Throughout my career, I’ve been a bit of a Corporate Communications butterfly. Going from role to role, project to project on external, internal, campaigns, partnering, internal comms, PR to corporate partnerships – and it was brilliant. Why? Because the variety of scope, teams and audiences means that I have naturally developed a skill of thinking broadly.
I now have a fairly unique skill and viewpoint where I can quickly see the bigger picture, as well as the detail, understand the impact from all angles and quickly come to a place of solution and innovation using experience from a range of roles. A while ago, I saw colleagues niche down in their specialisms and accelerating, but now, this is the time to celebrate the generalists.
In today’s world where we we’re facing new challenges that we would never have imagined that we would face with change coming in at an incredible speed – we shouldn’t just be digging deeper, we’ll need to dig elsewhere to find the solution – said the brilliant Edward De Bono.
And who will be able to help do that? The broad thinkers, those that are resourceful with their knowledge and experience to create innovative solutions to new problems.
So today – I want to celebrate Jack……
