🧱 Career Strategy #5: Skill-stacking

When one plus one makes a million... and the world's best croissants.

Sep 12, 2024

Welcome back to Fuzzy’s Career Strategy Series, where we share research-backed strategies to help you realise your best career.

Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series
Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy
Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy
Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy
Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy
Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy
Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy
Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy
Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy
Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy
Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy
Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy
Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

There are thousands of possible pathways for your career, but our research found there are ~10-15 dominant career strategies, which can be layered together if needed - and we’ll be breaking those down for you in this series.

“If you want to be extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become good (top 25%) at two or more things.”

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert

🧱 Introducing Strategy #5: Skill-Stacking

How does an Australian aerospace engineer like Kate Reid end up making the world’s best croissants at Lune Croissanterie?

She used one of our favourite career strategies - an approach known as skill-stacking - to approach the field of baking in an innovative way.

More on Kate’s journey later, but first - let’s explore the strategy.

⚙️ How it works

Skill-stacking involves stacking two or more different skills, to create more rare and powerful combinations, which allow you to generate outsized value.

🤔 Why?

As you refine a specific skill, you eventually face diminishing returns to your efforts - which means you have to work harder and harder for each unit of improvement.
For example, think about how long it takes to reach the top 25% in the world at something - say, Formula 1 engineering.
It might take you a decade to get to the top 25%, and another decade of effort to reach the top 10% within the rarified world of F1 engineers.
But for the same decade of effort you put into going from top 25% to top 10%, you could acquire and refine another skill to become top 25% in two areas - for example, combining people management and F1 engineering.
With that intersection of experiences, you can do more than just refine a car’s mechanics - you can lead a team of engineers and drivers to a victory, with a much greater personal impact on that team’s success.

Essentially - for the same units of additional effort, you can develop a much more rare and powerful skillset.
By skill-stacking intelligently, you can bring a unique, differentiated approach to problems in your field - allowing you to add value in ways that people who’ve been trained to think in one field may not.

Image courtesy of Thomas Pueyo - for a deeper explanation of the diagram, we recommend checking out this excellent post.

You can be in the top 10% of F1 engineers, or the top 1% of people leaders who understand F1 engineering teams.

In fact, many of the greatest innovators are skill-stackers and polymaths who combine two, three, four or more fields to have an outsized impact.

For example:

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel combined the analytical skills she learned as a physicist with her political skills,
Stephen Colbert combined world-class comedic skills with a focus on politics to reenergise political satire, and
Lin-Manuel Miranda combining a gift for musical theatre with a passion for American history to create Hamilton!

This concept of skill stacking can apply for all of us - and a useful way to think about by being intentional with where you invest your energy next, rather than just ‘go with the flow’ of deeper specialisation.

👀 A Note On Visualising Your Skillset

Keen to figure out what your skillset looks like?

Here’s how.

Start by listing your skills horizontally (known as breadth) and map out the depth of each one, from ‘beginner’ to ‘mastery’.

For example, you might find that your skillset is T-shaped: with a basic knowledge of a few areas, combined with depth in one area:

T-Shape specialists — who are they, and why do you need your team to have such | by Dim Blinov | Agile Pies | Medium

Or you might find that that you are more ‘I-shaped’ (a deep expert in one thing), or a generalist (with breadth across a number of areas).

Forget the T-shaped skillset: Try being a comb instead! – Platonic

Or even a Pi-shaped or comb-shaped skillset, with a mix of breadth and depth across multiple areas!

Many top skill-stackers take on Pi-shaped and comb-shaped formations like these - and in the case study below, we’ll explain how!

🥐 Case study: Kate Reid of Lune Croissanterie

Women Who Launch: Kate Reid · The Sybarite

Kate Reid originally trained as an aerospace engineer, working for the Williams Formula One racing team in the UK, where she applied her engineering skills to designing and optimising race car components to enhance speed and efficiency on the track.
But in spite her success in engineering, Reid was unsatisfied, and decided to pursue her passion for food, particularly croissants.
She traveled to France, where she trained with some of the best bakers to master the art of the croissant, and honed her baking skills with a deep respect for tradition.

But rather than just be a great engineer or a great traditional baker, what makes Reid unique is the way she combined her mastery of tradition with an engineer’s mindset of meticulous refinement.

After returning from Paris and failing in her initial attempts to replicate the croissants she had made there, Reid realised that the traditional method needed significant adjustments to work in a new environment.

Instead of relying on conventional techniques, she began experimenting by modifying one variable at a time, applying the precision and problem-solving skills she had used as an engineer.
Over the course of three months, she developed a unique three-day process tailored to her vision of the perfect croissant.

Lune Croissanterie, which opened in Melbourne in 2012, reflects Reid's unique combination of technical skill and creativity, and now attracts travellers from all over Australia and the world to experience their incredible products being made firsthand.

By stacking two skillsets many people would not think to combine, Kate Reid was able to innovate in a fundamentally new way.

Want to learn more about Lune? Check out the video below!

A note from Lucy

From online harassment to sexual assault at work events: Australia's tech startup ecosystem needs to fully reckon with sexism - Missing Perspectives

Personally, I am a huge fan of skill stacking! I know we’re not supposed to have favourite strategies but I’m going to level with you - this is one of mine.

I am definitely not in the world’s top 1% in social science or business skills.

But I have found that combining my training as a social scientist, which was all about deeply understanding human behaviour and social change, with learning business skills at McKinsey has helped to identify promising neglected markets (e.g. for a sexual wellness brand like Normal) - and helped me to succeed in growing businesses within those too.

🚀 Maximise your chances of success

Like the sound of this strategy? So do we!

But here are a few considerations to keep in mind 👇

Choose the right intersection: Remember that while some combinations of skills have a multiplier effect on the value you can add, while others may not have any applications where they can cross over! For example, rock-climbing & baking - not impossible, but difficult to picture 🤣
Learn to explain yourself: We’re used to seeing conventional CVs from people who start in a single job and climb the ladder in a narrow way - so learn to communicate your experiences in a coherent narrative to show why you’re super-valuable rather than indecisive.
Create leverage: One great way to skill-stack effectively is to go beyond being an individual contributor to increasing your ‘leverage’ i.e. getting bigger outcomes for the same inputs. A classic is often combining knowledge of a specific field (e.g. F1 engineering) with soft or generalist skills to work effectively with others and manage teams!

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