By widening your career path you are giving yourself a better chance of remaining employed. If you diversify your skill set and then your job is eliminated, you have a better chance of sliding into another position in the same company. This would be a chance that you would not have had if you had confined yourself to the singular approach that has been popular for so many years. In this tough time when companies are cutting down jobs, a person with a wide career path will get a job more quickly as compared to a person with a single plain degree.
Widening your career path makes you more valuable to your employer. You need to look at it from the eyes of the company brass. If you have two people in your company, both equally likeable, both making the same salary, both with a similar tenure at the company and both fairly close in all track able measures but one of them has the ability to do several variations of the job or is well versed in several different things, which one do you think you would let go if the economy mandated a lay off or force reduction? It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to figure out that the person who has a varied skill set is more valuable to the company and thus is more likely to be the one that is kept on.
So does choosing a wide career path make sense? Unless you are the kind of person who enjoys the challenge of switching careers mid stream as the economy changes and your job is removed from the company roster, I think you can see the benefits of thinking in a wider scope.
Certainly you might be thinking that something as specialized as an engineer position should be a fairly safe one and that there is little chance of that job falling under the chopping block during a budget crunch. While in the past that may well have been true, in the challenging marketplace today there is no reason to think that the paradigm of the last ten years will continue to sustain and yield the same results for the next ten years.
If history has proven anything it is that the only constant is change and as Bob Dylan said, the time’s they are a changing. The survivors of the current state of the world will be the ones who are able to adapt and overcome that change through self diversity; and only you know if that person is going to be you or not.
