Why your Training team needs Versatilists.

I wrote recently about Learning Generalists and the importance of growing them as part of your team. Many months back, Gartner coined the term - Versatilist.

"Versatilists are able to apply a depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, equally at ease with technical issues as with business strategy."


When I wrote about the Learning Generalist, I actually meant a Generalizing Specialist/ Master Generalist as the industry understands it these days. There are obvious benefits of having these people on your team:

• Its easy to redeploy these pros based on changes in business requirements or strategy.
• They lend balance to your team -- allow you to achieve more with a small team. For eg: a training team may not need a graphic designer or an e-learning specialist for a long time; a learning generalist on the other hand can play this role for a short time, reducing your costs and increasing your flexibility.
• Most importantly, they help you mitigate people risks - if you have a fair number of generalists in your team, you don't run the risk of your projects coming to a stand-still because one person got run over by a truck. You have others that can don the mantle of the person who is sick, on leave, on a sabattical, becoming a mother, or leaving the organization. Your team is more responsive to change, and you generally face less stress.

So the next person you hire for your training department -- try finding out if she tends to specialize in just one area or is she versatile enough to pick up just about any work in your team! I'm sure you'll end up hiring your A player!