Cloud Tech Beginner: Should You Generalise Or Specialise?

At the start of your tech career there’s a very important decision you need to make.

Should you specialise or generalise to be successful?

For example, if you’re interested in a career in the cloud you might be asking yourself if it’s better to specialise in a career like Cloud Security, or do you go for a general job title like Cloud Engineer or DevOps Engineer?

Now from my standpoint this is an easy decision.

I believe that tech beginners should always generalise at the start of their career, and today, I’m going to give you 3 reasons why.

But don’t worry, I’m also going to sprinkle in some nuance as to when specialising might be more appropriate than generalising.

Now I understand that this is a very controversial take, so make sure you watch the video till the end then leave a comment below with your thoughts.

The first reason why you should always generalise rather than specialise as a tech beginner, is because you have no idea what the day to day responsibilities of a specialist are. So you might go into it with unrealistic expectations.

For example, I know a lot of tech beginners who think they want to work in cyber security. They have an image of themselves fighting bad guys and defending against sophisticated hackers. 

Hollywood loves painting glamorous scenes of cyber security professionals battling against hackers who want to breach the firewalls and bring down the government.

But is this an accurate picture of the cyber security industry?

The reality is that a lot of the day to day responsibilities of a cyber security professional can be routine and repetitive. 

Your main responsibilities include: 

• Making sure your company’s processes are inline with compliance or regulatory standards.
• Keeping the business IT systems and softwares patched.
• Educating employees about cyber security threats, for example, telling Steve in accounting to stop writing his passwords down on a sticky note and then leaving it next to his computer. How many times have I told you Steve?!

Now don’t get me wrong, it's honest work and somebody’s have to do it.

Some people find it interesting, other people find it boring.

But you NEED to know what you’re getting into, or else you risk spending years of your life and thousands of dollars trying to break into a specialist industry, only to realise once you finally get that job that you hate it because it’s not what you thought it would be.

I want to counteract this with an example of a generalised role.

Imagine you decide to pursue a career as a cloud engineer or devops engineer, you’ll get exposed to a variety of disciplines, for example you’ll learn how to build infrastructure, configure networking, manage security, and much more.

You’ll get to sample a lot of different disciplines and in the future, if you do decide to specialise in one of them you’ll already have experience of what that looks like day to day and have a good idea if it’s right for you. 

This will help you make more informed decisions.

For example, let's assume you want to specialise in cloud security, but you decide to take my advice and get a job as a cloud engineer first. 

While you’re in this generalised role you get some experience working with cloud security, cloud networking, storage and databases. You might then decide that actually you prefer networking over security and want to specialise in networking instead.

Basically going general at the start of your career allows you to experience different options so if you do decide to specialise in the future you can go into it with your eyes wide open and have more realistic expectations of the role.

The second reason why I recommend tech beginners to generalise rather than specialise is because there are simply a lot more generalist jobs out there than there are specialist jobs.

The truth is that most companies don’t need specialists. Instead they need individuals who can wear multiple hats and perform various tasks. 

By trying to specialise at the start of your career, you may significantly reduce your job options.

What makes this worse is that for those companies that are hiring specialists, they usually prefer people with years of experience because the reason the company is hiring a specialist in the first place is because they’re encountering problems that the generalists in their company can’t solve. 

This means that these companies will most likely not choose beginners who lack sufficient industry experience to tackle these tricky issues. As a beginner, it’s difficult to compete with the more experienced specialists for these roles.

This is why I recommend you start out as a generalist, where you can begin building up your skills and experience. These experiences will make you more valuable if and when you decide to specialise.

The final reason why you should generalise rather than specialise at the beginning of your tech career is because all technology is interconnected.

Here’s what I mean...

Let’s assume you want to specialise in Cloud Security. 

What a lot of tech beginners don’t realise is that you need to understand how the components of a cloud ecosystem works to be able to secure it effectively.

For example, to properly secure networking components, you should understand how networking works. 

Or to secure virtual machines you should understand how virtual machines work and how bad actors could potentially try to attack them. Same with databases and other critical technology infrastructure.

This is why it is important to generalise at the start of your career. Because when you generalise, you build up an understanding of how the different components work together which will make you more effective when you do decide to specialise.