Your skill set is one of the most important features to market properly before an employer is going to invest in you. It’s up there with experience and educational background, and for technical positions, maybe even higher. There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to presenting your skills. For our purposes, we’ll call them the depth approach and the breadth approach.

The depth approach is giving a company the idea that you excel in the specific task at hand and haven’t really bothered to work on less central, albeit related, skills. Tim the Finance major might use the depth approach in his interview for the finance position at Big Business Inc. by informing the interviewer of his membership in the finance club, the four electives that he took focusing on Excel Spreadsheets, and his summer job as a Financial Assistant at his local bank. He may not have spent his time learning about many other aspects of the business world, but why would he when it is a financial position he wants, right?

The breadth approach is presenting yourself as a well-rounded candidate who has focused on acquiring a broad range of skills that could be useful in your field, without having become an expert in any one area. Jane, a Finance major interviewing for the same finance position as Tim, might choose to employ the breadth approach by letting the interviewer know about her proficiency with Excel and other financial tools, but also touching upon her public speaking elective, her experience in trying to start her own business, and the leadership skills she gained as editor of the school newspaper. Jane figures she can learn exactly how to do the job at hand once she’s hired, but the more general skills are harder to come by and almost guaranteed to be necessary at some point.

I like to think of the depth vs. breadth approaches as two different ways to dig a big, wide hole. You can either dig a narrow opening all the way down to the bottom then scrape away at the edges until your hole is wide enough, or you can dig the full width of the hole, one layer at a time, until you have reached the bottom.

As it is with most alternative problem solving styles, there is not one universally correct approach for every situation, and often the right approach for each position is actually a blend of the two. However, I recently attended a dinner with several hiring managers from a large government contracting company, and in discussing the two styles with one of them that had been working with the company for over 20 years, I learned that there is definitely a trend.

He pointed out the transition of the U.S. economy in the last couple decades from one rooted in manufacturing to one based more heavily on services. This transition meant that the business style of having each employee master a given piece of your overall process (picture an assembly line) needed to evolve, and so it did, into a more versatile, more adaptable model where every employee can and should be expected to deal with several problems of vastly different natures in the span of a single day. Although he admitted that both the depth and breadth approaches have their merits, he alluded to his personal preference towards an employee that was able to “wear many different hats,” and that most hiring managers at his company shared this same view. He also added that the breadth approach is inarguably advantageous for anyone that wishes to advance to managerial positions, as general skills are exponentially more important at that level. The manager at my co-op this summer shared with me this same insight.

And so, odds are the interviewer at Big Business Inc. has caught on to this same trend, and probably likes the way Jane’s broad skill set sounds right now. He knows exactly the size of the hole the company needs her to dig, and that her more prepared, more stable approach to doing so is going to allow her to deal with anything she might unearth. Tim’s background would allow him to dig much deeper into his position much more quickly, but if he comes across any sort of unexpected problem that requires an outside skill, he might just get buried alive.

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