Thinking about increasing your value

I've mentioned the idea of increasing your value to your employer in previous posts, but I haven't given any specifics. Ok, here are some specifics.

I think of technical skills in four areas:

1. Functional skills. These are the skills you were taught when you learned about technology. If you're a developer, these are your design, development, and debugging skills.
2. Domain expertise. How much you know about the insides of your organization's products. I think of problem-space (what's the problem you're trying to solve) and solution-space (how does the system solve the problem) aspects of domain expertise.
3. Tools and technology. The languages, operating systems, configuration management systems, all the tools you know internals of. No, it doesn't count to list word processors here unless you know how they parse input or some other internal aspect of the system.
4. Industry understanding. Each industry has its own implicit requirements. If you work for a pharmaceutical company, FDA audits (or the threat/promise of one) is something you live with. That means you need to have requirements traceability. This expertise is how much you understand about the industy in which you work.

If you haven't thought about where to increase your value yet, consider one of these areas. I don't know what's most valuable to your organization, but chances are good one of these are.

If you're a developer and want to increase your functional skills, you could learn a variety of architectures and discuss the merits of each the next time you have some high-level design. Or you could learn to pair-program. Or you could learn three techniques for peer review (yes, there are more than three).

If you want to increase your domain expertise, read the code in another area of the product. Or ask to work on a cross-functional (product functional area) team, so each of you starts learning what everyone else needs to consider when they develop in these areas.

I wrote about this in my hiring blog, in Jobs and Careers. Maybe none of my examples are right for you--in which case you'll need to think about what is more valuable to your organization.

Oh, and if you think this is your manager's job, think again. As Esther and I wrote in Behind Closed Doors, career development belongs to both the employee and the manager. Don't wait for your manager to think about it or have the conversation with you--he or she may not know how.