The Benefits of Being a Generalist

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I've been thinking about this recently, like for some of the younger analysts I've been talking to. Could you even just talk to your specialists and urge them to like branch out a little bit or just not even branch out in what they're doing? But if they could better understand what the specialist next to them is doing in a different area, then it would give them just a little bit of context to be a little more general than before. And we do that in our team meetings every week. We have partners that all have different skill sets. And so every Wednesday with different partner presents something they're working on or they're learning. And that's what we're all benefiting from their

There are only so many hours in a day and only so many days in a year. Logically, then, the best way to grow a career as a data worker is to spend as many hours as possible doing focused data work, right? Well… probably not. In this episode, we dove into generalization versus specialization — what does that even mean, and how should we think about balancing between the two, and how can interests and activities outside of the data work itself actually make us better analysts? Bonus activity: listen for the hosts' overt trolling of Tim to see if they can get him to come off mute in his role as associate producer for the episode. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.