“A jack of all trades and a master of one”: What is the ideal skill set to balance in a creative team?

The Creative Skills Report, by It’s Nice That in partnership with Adobe, is a reflection of the skills, needs and opinions of our industry. Gaining our insight by surveying a long list of studios, agencies and brands, we expand on one of the emerging themes we discovered. For even more insight into the creative skills currently vital to our industry, and what our teams may need in future, you can download the full Creative Skills Report here.

As a creative practitioner, whether to learn as many skills as possible or double down to become the very best at just one is an argument our industry seems to have been having since the dawn of time. Even most recently, in a survey we conducted to produce The Creative Skills Report, a reflection of the industry today as told to us by over 60 of Europe’s leading design studios, everyone still couldn’t agree.

The difficulty in answering this question seems to stem from the rapid and competitive speed our industry is currently running at. Deciding what skills to adopt or adapt to is often driven by this competitive edge and the need to win work. It makes sense, therefore, that the safest bet is to have a team which encompasses as many skills as possible. But does this leave too little room for craft? As one respondent to our survey put it: “Where do you prefer to buy meat? The butcher or the supermarket?” It’s a difficult career decision to make as an individual, and even more complicated if you’re a manager or team leader.

It turns out that it’s not a generalist or a specialist approach to creativity which seems best either; instead it’s the “T-shaped” approach. Describing a skill set that features a broad overview of an industry (the horizontal part of the T), and a deeper understanding of one subsection (the vertical part) to prop it up. In fact, this approach is so popular that 75 per cent of our respondents felt like it was the best way to future-proof your career as a creative, rather than to generalise or specialise.

That said, to execute some of these broader ideas, the agency regularly needs to engage with freelancers or partners for specialisms. However, in the view of Eric, Campbell and Alex: “This collaboration actually makes things more interesting, and means that we have a bespoke team with exactly the right skills for that particular job.” This network and approach is all part of DesignStudio working towards elevating “our business and ability”, and always by investing “in certain core specialisms, but individuals with a generalist outlook.”

Further along the generalist side of the spectrum is YuJune Park, partner and founder of Synoptic Office, a multi-disciplinary design studio working across design, technology and education. YuJune explains that she’d “loosely describe our team as being generalists, although we do have varying and complementary areas of expertise across interaction design, spatial graphics, and branding”. However, her justification for the generalist description is due to the studio’s approach, especially as “we don’t pigeon-hole ourselves, or our team, into doing one specific kind of work.”

Operating largely as communication designers, due to the wide possibilities of where Synoptic’s work might end up, variation is key. “If we each just burrow down into our area of expertise, it’s challenging to understand a project in its entirety,” YuJune points out. “It’s a bit like the blind man and the elephant. If you only work on the leg or the trunk, you risk missing the elephant.” This approach also aligns with the studio co-founder’s own belief that “skills are tenuous,” rightfully pointing out how: “The skills and software we are using now might be irrelevant in five years. However, the desire to learn how to learn, to see and ask questions will carry you through a lifetime of work.”

This approach has also developed from YuJune’s experience teaching, with both herself and co-founder Caspar Lam on the faculty at Parsons School of Design, “and this has shaped how we approach our design practice.” Looking at a brief as an inquisitive problem, the studio has therefore “always approached design as a method of inquiry”. This has encouraged the studio to follow a cycle with its making. Rather than always repeating the same task with the same skill, “we try to give equal weight to making, thinking, writing, and teaching, with each aspect continually informing the other.”

Offering this perspective John also points out that possibly, our survey’s reluctance to decide whether to be a generalist or specialist – and so more likely to pick the in the middle option of T-shaped – slightly comes from fear. “It’s a scary jump,” he points out, considering the possibility of settling on one of his creative careers full-time. Therefore, juggling the two is John trying to close that gap so it doesn’t feel as daunting. “Instead of jumping ten metres, you juggle a bit of the way, and it’s still a jump, but only two, or three metres.” This also leads the multi-hyphenate creative to believe that “you can be a jack of all trades and a master one” – if you give yourself and others the space to do so, that is.

This space also means that one can avoid the detrimental effects of specialising too young, and developing, as John puts it, “a mental block of not knowing you could do something else”. So even though he describes himself as a specialist, it’s by bouncing between these two specialisms that John seems able to thrive best.

It leads us to believe that the ideal skill set to balance in one creative team, no matter if you’re a specialist team at a brand, an independent studio or a global agency, is a range of individuals each willing to learn. This could be about your individual interest, whether it be typography, film or motion design, or the possibility of picking up something entirely different. Without this attitude towards skill sets, the opportunity of propelling yourself forward just gets smaller and smaller. As YuJune Park so rightfully points out, the process of being a creative (aside from what category you decide upon) is “a cyclical pattern, each building upon one another”.