In today’s era of talent I find it important for people to gain mastery not just in one skill but in more than one, at least in two. Well, this may even be a necessity.

During the course of creating our website/portal ready I was looking for people who could create our website. Our technology partner are adept at creating the applications but creation of the front end / UI / design is not there forte. I went about looking for people who could create the UI or do the designing for us. I faced many challenges in the process. There were people who were adept at the tools and technology – html, photoshop, coreldraw, CSS and so on. But the problem with almost all these people were that their aesthetic senses were very poor. The designs they created were very poor in quality, they were not appealing, the human element in the designs were missing. So here was a set of people who were technically good but poor in creativity. Then I found the other set of people who could do the creative part very well. They were able to absorb the concept create visuals, the colours, contrasts and layouts were very appealing but they would not know how to turn them into web pages.

The ideal person would have been those who had the aesthetic or creative abilities with the technical skills.  This is what I call by being skilled in multiple faculties. Is it about yin and yang in skills? Is it about the well developed right and left brain? Maybe.

We can find parallels of this case of combination of creative plus technical talent for web in other areas too. A functional specialist in a software industry has to be able to appreciate the software engineering to contribute to creation of appropriate solutions. A civil architect like our web creatives, need a combination of capabilities in civil engineering plus the aesthetics involved in architecture. A surgeon needs to be adept at the surgical practices and also the technicalities of the medical equipments. A combination of functional expertise and business skills in required for successfully running an enterprise or business unit. A good music composer also is one who is adept at sound technology.

Such combinations are rare to find. I realised this in my search for web creative person. I also believe that the same situation prevails in organizations where such combinations are required. There is a premium one would place for such multiple skills. HR, managers and leaders in companies could look for people within the organization who have the aptitude for such dual specialization and nurture them. But such spotting of talent would require out of the box thinking, a classical performance appraisal system may not be able to bring out such talent. Lets say we want to nurture the creative talent in engineers and that we would like to sport such talent. Maybe the organization could organise a competition which involves modeling, drawing, sketching, painting, etc. for engineers. On the part of the individuals when they believe that their field may require dual talent, maybe such talent can be nurture if the basics (aptitude and inclination) are there in the individual.

Realising the importance and the value of the duality of skills is the first step.