The trend within IT is to respect the specialist, to automatically aspire to deep expertise as a career objective. Not so fast.

The choices you make for your knowledge shape can affect the jobs you get, the value you deliver within those jobs and your job satisfaction.

One of the basic traps of technical careers is the expert cul-de-sac. Once you are the guru, you tend to get stuck there. The company does not want you to move on because nobody else can do it better. The narrower your expertise, the fewer are your options in the organisation or elsewhere. You can be overqualified, or not a good fit. Once you reach the pinnacle of your field, you have to go down again before you can ascend.

Sometimes your area of specialisation can start to melt away as technology changes. You end up like a polar bear on an ice floe, with a tough swim ahead of you once it disappears. I learned this lesson early by becoming a world expert in a proprietary mainframe fourth-generation language. Good career move, that one...not.

Those who escape the expert cul-de-sac often go into architecture or become business technologists or business analysts, but these roles are generalist roles. The shift is difficult. It requires an exceptional person who can be both broad and deep. Or it requires learning multiple new areas and unlearning one, to morph your knowledge shape.

Withdrawal Symptoms

It is possible to un-learn, but only somewhat. You can take the boy out of the technology, but you can’t completely take the technology out of the boy (or girrrl). It hurts to abandon expertise. It is like surgical removal.

It particularly hurts if you must give up technical areas altogether to learn your business, or to learn new disciplines like warehousing, writing, finance, marketing, communications, politics, analysis or people management. We get withdrawal symptoms. I dealt with them by furtively building a spreadsheet now and then with unnecessary features. When I formed my own company, I implemented my own LAMP stack and CMS for the new business servers, because it was a sound business decision to do it myself [Yeah right!].

Deep expertise is not necessarily a disadvantage in job hunting. When the right job comes up, you won’t face much competition. At times you will be headhunted. Sometimes you can name your price.

For as long as your expertise matters, your boss will love you...and cut you some slack. More than 20 years ago the IBM expert on these new-fangled machines called ATMs arrived in Australia. Among the standard IBM suits and haircuts he dressed in t-shirt and jeans, had a beard and long hair. The reaction of the bank executives he came to meet? “Man, he must be good.”

For the cynics among you (and there are a few in IT), specialists can wedge themselves firmly in a niche where they go unnoticed for periods of time, and get to play with some serious toys. Be warned: There is danger of complacency here that we discussed in How Secure is Your IT Technical Career?