Job seekers often find themselves at the receiving end of persuasive advice, doled out to them from time to time and a recurring one happens to be about specializing in a given field in order to bag plum positions.
Diverse Skill Set
This is indeed great advice, what it omits is the fact that working in many different industries can be a big plus. When you have a varied job experience behind you, it is quite natural for you to have a diverse skill set as well and this in itself renders you more valuable to your employer.
Pool of Talent
This comes across more prominently in areas where the available pool of talent has a really narrow area of expertise. Having broad working experience, benefits not just the employers it benefits the employee as well, it helps the employee to go ahead and evaluate a prospective workplace with a keen eye.
Career Path
Young and inexperienced employees are prone to hopping jobs at the onset of their career as they are undecided on the career path they want to take. Their situation can be mitigated by working in diverse industries, and getting first hand insight of what these jobs entail and their unique requirements, rather than exploring only a handful of them.
Real World Experience
The most important off shoot is they are able to get real world experience of varied sets of industries. Not to miss the all important additional perk that an employee is able to give himself or herself a raise by taking a significantly higher paying job rather than going ahead and coaxing the same from the current employer, which gets next to impossible at times.
Excellent Work Place
This experience equips you with a far better ability to appreciate a pleasant boss and an excellent work place, with good salary and additional benefits. You would easily and quickly recognize an organization in which you find some or all of the aspects to be sub par.
A Broader Experience
Besides obtaining a broader experience, one is able to make comparisons of what they like and dislike about various aspects related to a given career path. Coming across various workplaces leaves you with a rich body of experience as to what is good, or average about a workplace.
A Veritable Goldmine
With a diverse workplace history behind, you are in a better position to target your transferable skills, to a still broader range of potential future employers. It helps to tie different bits of your job history so that they fit different job openings, varied skills are an added advantage. Come to think of it your previous workplace experience can be a veritable goldmine of information, to any new employer.
Best Work Practices
This holds especially true when you are making a move to a smaller company from a larger one. Come to think of it, your knowledge regarding the best work practices, may bring the new employer a wealth of information that might have cost your previous employer a lot in monetary terms as consultancy fees.
Final Words
Highlighting superior quality experiences gained from working in various departments in larger organizations is indeed a great idea as it stands you in good stead, especially in the context of smaller firms. Refrain from blurting out certain things, like mentioning consultancy costs borne by previous employers.
It would belittle the present employer and may hurt your career progression, however do not shy from underlining the expertise obtained by working at great places and do make a mention as to how the same can be applied to the present workplace for success despite the smaller size of the organization.
