In a tight job market, there are ways for job seekers to show potential employers that not only can they fill a job need, but they can potentially save an employer money by having little start-up training time, and they can be an on-site expert in their field.
Through demonstrating specialization or large amounts of knowledge in a specific area, job seekers can show a high level of value to potential employers while achieving job satisfaction. Specialization can make the process of looking for a job much easier for the specialized job seeker.
Through job specialization, a job applicant can realize some benefits in the job market.
• Specialization in a niche sets a job seeker up as an expert in their field. For positions that require a great amount of knowledge, like nursing or computer/IT, specialization separates you from job applicants with generic pools of knowledge.
• Specialists can command a greater amount of money than non-specialists. When an applicant for a job shows an expert level of knowledge in their field, a company may be able to justify better pay for that specialized knowledge.
• Job specialization is in itself a form of marketing, a tool that makes an applicant stand out from others. It helps brand a person in a field, and in local markets, a person with specialized knowledge may find their name come up often, a great demand placed on their knowledge.
• People with job specialization have credibility in their position that creates trust for and reliance on their expertise from others.
• An expert in a field has knowledge that is not easily replaced. Many jobs emphasize the importance of having broad knowledge, but in many technological and medical fields, a wide range of knowledge is not as valuable. A nurse with a specialization in heart medicine will find her niche within a cardiology practice much easier than an RN with a broad area of practice.
• Specialization often means doing repetitive work, which may sound annoying in practice, but in a field someone loves, doing the same thing over and over is not as problematic. Specializing in the right thing is key, but it is important to remember that people who know how to do the minutia involved in jobs and do it well will always be in demand.
• Similarly, because specialization involves what some consider drudgery, fewer people are willing to do it. Be it becoming the person in the office who knows everything there is to know about a computer program to being a neuro-surgeon, specialization requires work some consider boring. If a person is willing to specialize, simply the act of specialization may be enough to set them above other job applicants.
• Employers often post narrow job requirements, such as knowing a couple of specific computer languages. Sometimes these narrow requirements are not the whole of the job but are posted as a way to weed out under qualified applicants. These narrow requirements will automatically eliminate many job seekers. By knowing the narrow requirements that employers post, an applicant has a far better chance of making it to the first interview.
