Buceyedpea, I can't find the old thread and don't feel like digging through to find it. But this is an interesting debate so I'll just start a new thread. In the old thread, I talked about the trend of millenials "job hopping" and you basically implied that they were hurting their careers because the world is moving toward the trend of specialization. Here is a strong counter-argument from a Professor at Yale. He uses a compelling UPenn study to create a fact base:
http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/all-hail-the-generalist/
Here's the undeniable truth. Whether you like it or not, job hopping is the new way of the world. As Boomers exit and millenials enter, companies can either gripe and complain, or they can act upon it. Millenials like to job hop and that trend isn't likely to change, and in my experience, job hoppers are a great thing as long as you can understand the good compared to the bad:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanneme...e-nightmare/2/
And the best companies are adapting. That's why some of the top recruiters are loading up on rotational programs where workers can work in several half-year or year-long rotations:
http://careers.jnj.com/leadership-development-programs
http://www.ge.com/careers/culture/un...ts/experienced
There is obviously a necessary place for specialization and generalization. You spoke of Doctors vs. Nurses. Of course there are specialized roles which require extremely advanced educational degrees. No, you do not want nurses playing doctor and even if it would be valuable, it's just not cost-effective for a doctor to learn how to nurse as well. In the context of a hyperspecialized economy, sure, there's value to employing specialists in a specific area of expertise. Companies may outsource their health benefit planning or their internet marketing to a group that specializes in it. But it's expensive and in many cases, you get an inflexibly skilled work force so if you have to make cuts in one department, these workers are ill-equipped to work elsewhere. Companies with enough in-house expertise don't need to outsource nearly as much.
In-house, I've seen old corporate structures where you have people in Sales who've been there for 30 years and people who've managed market research for 30 years. My experience is that you tend to see a ton of workers who have never advanced far in their career, and the gaps in their skill set are striking. What good is market research if you're so inexperienced at giving presentations or understanding the "so what" that your data becomes unusable? How far will your career as a creative designer actually take you if you don't understand strategy and, therefore, frequently under-deliver what the client asks of you? When you do the same thing for 30 years, you don't bring in outside perspective. What we find with generalists is that they can quickly pick up the basics of a new role, and rely on experts to fill in small gaps, but they are coveted because they bring new ideas to the table.
You brought up the example of farms. The new age Farmer is becoming a generalist. They have to understand the entire chain from farm to table. Do you think all a Farmer knows how to do is grow crops? No. They are experts in commodity trading, they are meteorologists, they are excellent at sourcing, all the while they are savvy financial planners. Recently, they have become experts at social media and in order to grow, they have to have an MBA mindset in understanding how to run a small business. Small family farms are going away and are being replaced by mid- to large-size agribusinesses where, yes, they are vertically integrated enough that they handle quite a bit of the production process. In a farm environment where every dollar matters, a farmer who is terrific at growing crops, but doesn't understand financial markets or managing a business, isn't the one who's going to be ascending up the ranks. The guy who understands the whole farm business from soup to nuts, they're going to be the ones hiring specialists.
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Oh and Chiefzilla, Harvard Business Review and this Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management disagrees with you on division of labor not being more efficient and productive. I think they'd consider you hilariously misinformed. In fact they call "hyper-specialization" the "big idea."
http://hbr.org/2011/07/the-big-idea-...pecialization/
Lemme know when you grow wheat in your yard, harvest it, mill it, bake and slice it for bread. I just wanna know how long it takes ya'.