Career Repair? "A beneficial career skill is scalability. That’s the ability to do two jobs or three assignments,..."

"When you experience normal career development, you advance your skills and compound the

complexity of your assignments over time. Your career is damaged if you missed a chance to

develop on the schedule that you had intended. As explicated in this book until this chapter, each

stretch assignment gives you a chance to experience new things, to triumph over adversity, to

experience wins, or to fail at something and learn what you can do “next time.” With stalled

career development, not only is there no “next time” there is no “first time,” either...

In addition to the lack of newly acquired skills, existing skills atrophy from lack of use. Skills

you legitimately acquired in training or on the job wither away. Former supervisors lose their

people management skills in roles as an individual contributor. Managers who used to exercise

profit and loss authority lose executive decision-making skills as they execute strategies imposed

on them from above. College graduates doing jobs that do not require a college degree can no

longer remember why English 350 or Anthropology 101 really would apply in an office setting

(and, of course, they do)."

http://www.donaldasher.com/Chapter%2010%20for%20Web%20Site.pdf

A beneficial career skill is scalability. That’s the ability to do two jobs or three assignments,

then hand off part of that and go back to your old role, or go on adding more and more

responsibility, in infinite combinations. Scalability is actually an uncommon skill, and fast-track

careerists tend to possess it. Look again at the transitions from supervisor to leader on pp. xx.

Careerists with the skill to go in and out of these roles temporarily and successfully are

immensely valuable to organizations, particularly those facing a lot of change and stress.