thoughts from the test eye

When working as a consultant you must live up to the paradox that:
You should already be specialised and competent enough to get a contract i.e. best of all candidates for the job; but in order to stay alive in business you need to be as general as possible in order to meet the criteria for as many contracts as possible.
I.e. you should be a specialist and a generalist at the same time.
No news so far.
And in order to get specialised you can improve a lot by reading, studying, getting hands-on experience, discussing, etc. All made to improve your special skills.
So how about improving your general skills?
You could strive for working in as many different projects as possible; and you could also strive for shifting roles and work assignments.
By getting in touch with several techniques and methods you increase your toolbox, both when it comes to testing techniques and development methods/procedures.
But as I see it, perhaps the hardest thing is to be able to learn as much as possible without filling up your brain with too much noise that you won’t have any use for in future projects or the rest of your life.
So how can you maintain your general skills on a good enough level without being so skilled that you risk becoming a specialist? And especially if this concerns an area in which you only would like to maintain your general skills.
The trick is to be selective when learning stuff.

But notice that there is a difference between Strategic Incompetence vs. Selective Learning; let me give you an example.

A couple of years ago I faced a problem. During the first week on a new project I was told to read hundreds of documents and ten thousands of pages of documentation for a large system in order to understand what it was all about; a system which to me was a new technology and I had never worked with before. So in order to learn more about this system I was supposed to test I had to read these documents.
And my first reaction was “No, I will not do it”; the second reaction was “No, definitely not”. Actually, it is silly to demand that anyone should read this vast amount; and especially if you don’t know how long the contract is going to be. It might have been fine if the contract was on 5 years or so, then it might have been some point and time to complete it. And even if my reaction was “No”, I could not say to the customer that I would refuse to read these documents. Even if it had been right, I didn’t had the guts to do it; not in the first week of the contract.
Now you might think that I was lazy and did not want to take on the challenge to read all documents?
The issue was not that it would take time to read the material; my biggest issue was that if I have to choose what information to store in my brain I would not choose this noisy information. There are so many interesting things to learn; so many interesting books to read; so many lovely live moments to experience. There were so many other things that were much more interesting than the soulless information that I was supposed to read…
So what could I do?
It was not an option to grow my strategic incompetence in the area; then the contract would have been lost.
Instead I chose to read the material as shallowly as possible and only focus on those things that mattered; and thereby try to be as selective as possible when it came to learning. I.e. I developed my selective learning skill…
I consciously refrained from learning in order to not become specialized in the area.

My goal was to be a generalist and still be able to complete my mission. I wanted to preserve my specialist skill in testing but not in the specific subject (area of interest).

Read more:
http://www.cio.com/article/102352/Specialists_vs._Generalists
http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/102876/the-art-of-showing-pure-incompetence-at-an-unwanted-task