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You could be forgiven for thinking that the future belongs to the exceptionally well-rounded individual. After all, the current career rhetoric supports the idea of a labor economy in which we all know how to code, think of ourselves as startups of one and continually brand and rebrand ourselves for the jobs we’ll hop between at intervals of 18 months.
There’s the idea of the full-stack employee, which is more or less an improbably multi-skilled worker who is socially adept, technically proficient, insatiably curious, always-on and seemingly still human. Coined by Chris Messina in a popular Medium piece, he sees these uber employees as a bridge between the current workforce and working robots of the future.
There is also the concept of netweaving, which may not be a replacement for networking as much as a proposed reframing of interconnectedness. Instead of looking at networking as a means of personal advancement and opportunity identification, netweaving positions the individual as a connector and problem solver. You don’t network to find a job. You netweave to find a series of problems or challenges to solve. Consulting agency sparks & honey goes so far as to predict that netweaving will be the de facto career orientation of Gen Z, whose work trajectories will be a mashup of multiple simultaneous jobs with little stickiness in working relationships. If this transience sounds like the current maligned gig economy on steroids, you aren’t far wrong.
And, of course, visions of a polymathic future are stoked by celebrities who aren’t content with dominating one domain and eagerly look to colonize others. Donald Trump is running for the GOP nomination. Kanye West is now a fashion designer. Jessica Alba founded a $1B business. And yet, even the famous often struggle to rise above dilettante status outside their singular spotlight. For every Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who went from a celebrated pro wrestler to a celebrated action star, there are a dozen Morrisseys. His attempts to apply his substantial lyrical talent to novel-writing have seen him pilloried by the press. The Guardian’s Michael Hann offered these words on the former Smiths frontman’s debut work:
“Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between covers by anyone other than a vanity publisher. It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination.”
If you’re disheartened that even Moz can’t seem to make the multidisciplinary expert thing work, don’t be. Actual data doesn’t support the notion of a future in which we’re all highly diversified workers. The bulk of the fast-growing jobs between 2012 and 2022 identified by the US Labor Department do not lend themselves to this-slash-that careers, either because the level of specialized education or training required to attain them makes that unfeasible or the nature of the work itself makes side jobs impractical. Your future daughter-in-law will likely not be a nurse practitioner by day and a cybersecurity specialist by night, for example.
Of course, the gig economy isn’t going anywhere and those with access only to low-income jobs will still likely have to juggle multiple roles by necessity, as they have in decades past. For those with more economic privilege and choice, opting to buy into a vision of switching effortlessly between disparate roles as you assemble your bespoke portfolio career should be vigorously questioned. A polymathic future may sound superficially appealing, but, no matter what, there will always be a place in the world for those who are exceptionally skilled in a single area.
