How to choose which skills to invest in

Let’s talk choosing professional skills to invest in.

10 years ago, I read famous cartoonist Scott Adam’s “How to fail at almost everything and still win big”.

Fantastic read — one of my favourite self-help books.

Scott Adams created the corporate satire comic “Dilbert”, which became a world wide phenomenon in the 90s and early 2000s.

So someone we can learn from in terms of building a special career^.

One big idea I took away from his book was: being great at two complementary skills beats being excellent at one skill.

i.e. GOOD + GOOD > EXCELLENT

If you’ve got good (but not great) technical skills, and good (but not great) public speaking skills, all of a sudden you’re the boss of the people that just have the technical skills.

In Scott’s case, when he combined his self-described “meagre business skills, bad art skills and average writing talent”, he became rich and famous.

So what might this look like for technical folks, like us cloud security specialists?

In my view, we should focus on combining:
CORE TECH SKILLS + COMPLEMENTARY, HIGH-LEVERAGE SKILLS (CHLS).

Core tech skills are foundational technical skills for cloud security. Marco Lancini has a great book (“The CloudSec Engineer”) covering this topic in more detail, but a few technical skills that come to mind:

• Basics of networking and infrastructure

• Basics of software engineering

• Managing and securing cloud services for your chosen provider (AWS, GCP or Azure)

• Containerisation & DevOps

Complementary, high-leverage skills are powerful skills unrelated to your main area of technical expertise.

These are often not developed by others in your industry, and so by cultivating them you gain a massive professional edge.

It’s a special kind of “professional alchemy” were you chuck a bunch of interesting, powerful skills in a potion and create a unique concoction that bubbles with career potential.

A few such skills that come to mind:

• AI (my pick with this newsletter)

• Digital marketing / community-building (another pick for me)

• Storytelling

• Public speaking

With some creativity, I’m sure you can think of plenty more.

Hope this helped. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts yourself, I’d be curious to hear them!

Nelson

^ Note: no comment on or endorsement of his recent political views, I haven’t followed him closely since reading his book. Putting that here as a disclaimer.