Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / The Case Against Skills Stacking
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this piece of career advice that's everywhere right now: stack more skills. Take the coding bootcamp, learn the SQL, get the certification. The idea is that more arrows in your quiver makes you more valuable. Luna: Right, the 'T-shaped' person or the 'combinatorial' skill set. It's seductive because it feels like you're future-proofing. Lucas: Exactly. But I want to push back on that today. Not because breadth is bad, but because the advice is often applied in a way that backfires. There's a real case against unfocused skills stacking. Luna: Okay, I'm listening. Give me the argument. Lucas: Let's start with a specific person. I'm thinking of a woman I interviewed — let's call her Sarah. She was a mid-career marketing manager at a mid-sized CPG company. She had about eight years of experience and was good at brand strategy. But she felt the market was shifting toward data-driven marketing, so she spent a year learning Python, SQL, and basic machine learning. Luna: That sounds proactive. She saw the trend and acted on it. Lucas: It does. But when she went for a promotion, she was passed over for someone with fewer years but deeper marketing analytics expertise. The hiring manager told her she was 'a jack of all trades, master of none.' Her coding was at an intermediate level — not strong enough to replace a data analyst, and her marketing skills hadn't deepened because a third of her learning time went to coding. Luna: Ouch. So she spread herself thin and ended up weaker in both areas. Lucas: Right. And this isn't just one anecdote. There's research from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looked at earnings trajectories of workers with different skill profiles. They found that workers who developed deep expertise in one domain — the top 10 percent in their field — earned about 40 percent more than those who were above average in multiple domains but not excellent in any. Luna: Forty percent is significant. So the market really does pay for depth over breadth. Lucas: It does. But it's not that breadth is worthless. It's that breadth needs to be strategic. Cal Newport, the Georgetown computer science professor who writes about 'So Good They Can't Ignore You,' calls this 'career capital.' The idea is that you build value by being rare and valuable in a specific skill. Then you can add adjacent skills that compound that core value, not dilute it. Luna: So the key is 'adjacent' — skills that amplify your core, not ones that take you in a completely different direction. Lucas: Precisely. For Sarah, if she wanted to stay in marketing, a better move would have been to go deep on marketing analytics — advanced attribution modeling, customer lifetime value analysis — rather than trying to become a junior data scientist. That would have made her the go-to person in her department. Luna: Let me push back a little, though. What about people in fields that are genuinely shrinking? I mean, if you're a travel agent in 2010, stacking skills into online booking systems or customer service tech might not have been enough. You might have needed to pivot entirely. Lucas: That's a fair challenge. There are definitely cases where the core skill itself is becoming obsolete. But I'd argue that's less common than people think, and it's often misdiagnosed. A travel agent's core skill isn't booking flights — it's curating complex itineraries and managing logistics. That skill is actually in demand in corporate travel management, event planning, even supply chain coordination. The mistake is conflating the industry with the skill. Luna: So you're saying most people should double down on their existing core, not pivot to a completely new one. Lucas: For most people, yes. But let me give you a counterexample where stacking worked brilliantly. I talked to a graphic designer — let's call her Mei. She was good at visual design but saw that the market was moving toward user experience research. Instead of trying to become a full UX researcher, she took a course on user testing methodologies and taught herself how to conduct usability studies. She then positioned herself as 'a designer who can validate with data.' Her rate went from 80 dollars an hour to 150. Luna: There it is — the adjacent skill. She added research to her design core, not replaced it. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what I want listeners to take away. It's not about never learning new things. It's about being strategic. There's a framework I like called the 'skills pyramid.' At the base is your core competency — the one thing you're best at. The next layer is adjacent skills that directly support or extend that core. The top layer is general knowledge — things like communication, project management, basic data literacy. Luna: So the pyramid is narrow at the top — you don't need to be great at everything, just good enough at the general stuff. Lucas: Right. Most people invert the pyramid. They spend 70 percent of their learning time on general skills and a little on their core. That's a mistake. The research suggests you should allocate about 70 percent of your learning time to your core, 20 percent to adjacent skills, and 10 percent to general knowledge. Luna: That 70-20-10 rule is a useful heuristic. I can think of a friend who's a financial analyst — he spent a year learning advanced Excel and financial modeling, and then added a bit of SQL and Python. He's now the go-to person for complex data pulls in his firm. He didn't try to become a data engineer. Lucas: That's exactly the pattern. And I think the mistake people make is they hear about AI or automation and panic. They think they need to learn everything to stay relevant. But the most future-proofed workers are the ones who are the best in their niche, not the ones who are okay at everything. Luna: So what's the concrete first step for someone listening right now who feels the itch to stack skills? Lucas: I'd say: define your core skill in one sentence. Not your job title — your skill. For example, 'I write persuasive copy for B2B software.' Or 'I build reliable data pipelines.' Then ask: what one adjacent skill would make me 50 percent more effective at that core? Focus there for the next six months. Ignore everything else. Luna: And if you can't articulate your core skill in one sentence, that's probably a red flag that you haven't gone deep enough yet. Lucas: Exactly. I think a lot of career dissatisfaction comes from being 'in a field' but not having a skill you can point to and say, 'I am one of the best at this.' And that's fixable. Luna: Okay, so let me play devil's advocate one more time. What about the first few years of a career? Should a new grad really go deep immediately, or is early career the time to explore broadly? Lucas: That's a great question. I think early career — say the first two or three years — is the time to sample. Try different roles, different industries, different types of problems. But by year three or four, you should start building depth. The people who stay 'explorers' for too long often end up with a resume that looks like a series of unrelated internships. Luna: So the shallow generalist trap can happen at any stage, but it's especially dangerous for mid-career professionals who have a family or mortgage — they can't afford to start over. Lucas: Right. And that's where the 'skills stacking' advice is most dangerous. A mid-career person who tries to pivot into a completely new field without deep expertise often ends up competing with people who have years of focused experience. That's a losing game. Luna: Unless they're willing to take a step back in seniority and pay to build that depth. Lucas: Which some people do, and that's fine if it's a deliberate choice. But the 'stack skills and stay at the same level' pitch is usually misleading. Luna: So to wrap up: be strategic about depth, add adjacent skills that amplify your core, and avoid the temptation to become a jack of all trades. Lucas: And remember the 70-20-10 rule for your learning time. If you do that, you'll stand out in a world where everyone is trying to do everything.