How to Expand Your Expertise Without Losing Your Focus

How to build new skills around a clear professional core

Aug 19, 2026

Enterprise architecture has been my thing for pretty much my entire career. I first came across it during my research years, and when I moved from academia to IT consulting, it quickly became the field where I built most of my practical expertise. Years later, when I joined CGI, I still came in mainly as an enterprise architecture consultant.

That core has stayed surprisingly stable. What has changed is everything that has gradually grown around it.

Over the years, my work has expanded into areas such as identity and access management (IAM), sales and proposal work, broader business consulting, and, more recently, practical AI. Some of these have become important parts of my professional toolkit. Others are supporting skills that simply help me do my main work better.

There was never much of a grand career plan behind this. Usually, a client assignment, a business need, or plain curiosity pulled me into something new. I learned enough to get the work done, studied some more, talked with people who knew more than I did, and gradually added another layer to my expertise.

Looking back, the most useful expansions in my career have had one thing in common: they have connected to something that was already there.

Broad Expertise Needs a Clear Core

I think broad expertise works best when there is a clear specialization underneath it.

There is certainly a market for generalists. At least many people deliberately position themselves that way. Generalist is also a relative term. I have sometimes been called a generalist architect because I work across business, information, application, and technology perspectives instead of focusing on something narrower, such as Azure architecture. At the same time, enterprise architecture itself is clearly a specialization when you look at business and IT consulting as a whole.

Both approaches can work. I have just always believed more in the power of having a recognizable specialization. I wrote about this in a previous article.

The risk with spreading yourself too widely is that your professional profile starts to get difficult to explain. You know something about strategy, cloud, data, AI, project methods, cybersecurity, and a handful of software products. Those are all useful things. But when someone asks what you are actually good at, the answer may take a surprisingly long time.

In my view, expertise needs something to attach to. There should be a recognizable core: a field, a type of problem, or a context where people know what to call you for.

For me, that core has long been enterprise architecture and, more broadly, making sense of complex organizations and change. I tend to look at the whole, figure out what actually matters, and make it understandable to other people. Enterprise architecture brings those things together: the big picture, the important connections, and a practical way to work with change.

The other things I have learned over the years sit around that core. They make it broader and more useful, but the core still gives the whole thing some shape.

With a clear core, new expertise has somewhere to go. And somewhat paradoxically, a clear specialization can make it easier to expand rather than harder.

Build Around What You Already Know

The most useful expansion usually happens close to the problems you already solve. A new skill should help you take on a wider role, understand a client problem better, work with new stakeholders, or deliver something you could not deliver before.

My IAM experience is a good example. IAM is a large field with its own technologies, processes, operating models, and specialists. It never became my main area of expertise, but I can still contribute to IAM-related assignments when needed. More importantly, it taught me how roles, identities, applications, data, security, and governance work in real organizations. That became another layer around my architecture expertise.

The same applies to proposal work and learning about the business of consulting. Understanding how consulting is sold, scoped, priced, and delivered helps me shape assignments, discuss options with clients, and turn an idea into something that can actually be bought and implemented. And, to be fair, it also helps with visibility and career opportunities. Sales and proposal work puts you in front of more clients, colleagues, and leadership and can open doors to new roles and responsibilities.

An architect who understands customer needs, decision-making, commercial realities, organizational politics, and implementation constraints can usually contribute much more than good models alone.

That is what deliberate expansion is about. The useful question is not only what you should learn next, but what that knowledge allows you to do.

Choose What to Learn

Professional development is also about choosing where to spend your time and attention. There will always be another framework, tool, platform, methodology, certification, or trend you could learn. The harder question is: which ones are actually worth going deeper into?

I find it useful to think about skills at different levels:

What do I want to become genuinely good at?
What should I know well enough to use in real work?
Where do I mainly need to understand the language and basics?
What can I comfortably leave to others?
Which new skill would strengthen what I already do well?

This is a more useful way to think about development than simply counting courses or certifications. Certifications can be valuable, of course, but completing one does not automatically mean you can use the skill in practice.

For me, AI is an area I have deliberately decided to explore at a practical level. I already use it in consulting and writing, which means I can learn through actual work rather than only through courses or theory. I want to understand the tools that are relevant to me well enough to use them effectively, question their outputs, and see where they genuinely improve the speed, quality, or impact of the work. I do not need to know every technical or theoretical detail, or have a strong opinion on which model is best.

Different skills also play different roles during a career. Some become part of your core expertise. Some strengthen that core. Others are useful tools for a particular project or period and may later become less important. For example, a broad generalist IAM architect profile may be less in demand today than it once was, while more specialized IAM skills have become more valuable.

Knowing how far to go with each skill is a professional skill in itself. You do not need to learn everything. You need to make good choices about what is worth learning deeply, what is worth understanding, and what you can safely leave to someone else.

Learn Through Real Work

I have to admit that I am fairly skeptical about training. Most courses I have attended over the years have been moderately useful at best, and the really good ones are surprisingly rare.

Training can give you concepts, terminology, examples, and some structure. That can be useful. But the things that matter most in expert work are usually learned by actually doing the work, making mistakes, seeing what works, observing how others do it, and discussing the difficult parts with people who have done it before.

Judgment develops in real situations with incomplete information, deadlines, clients, consequences, and people who may not agree with some neat theoretical model.

A new task → quick orientation → practical experience → observing others → reading or training → discussion with more experienced people → reflection → a slightly more difficult task.

The order matters. Once you have tried something in practice, you know what you do not understand. A book, course, or discussion suddenly becomes much more useful because you have real questions instead of just a pile of new concepts.

I try to practice new skills against a real need whenever possible. I do not draw architecture models just to practice drawing architecture models. I create them when there is an actual need for that. I approach AI in much the same way: rather than inventing exercises for myself, I use the tools for real writing, consulting, analysis, or other tasks and learn from what happens. I would recommend the same approach to others.

You can study a topic for months and still be quite lost when facing the first real assignment. Real work exposes the gaps quickly.

Mentors Show What Works in Practice

Mentors have played an important role in my development, especially in consulting and enterprise architecture. A good mentor can show you things that are surprisingly difficult to learn from books, courses, or even your own work.

They show how experienced people actually approach a problem: what they pay attention to, what they ignore, which questions they ask first, and when the work is already good enough. They can also help you reflect on your own work afterwards: what went well, what you missed, and what you should try differently next time. You still need to do the real work and make the occasional mistake, of course, but a good mentor can make that learning considerably faster.

I learned much of the practical side of developing an enterprise architecture practice during my time at Coala, a boutique enterprise architecture consultancy. There are surprisingly few good opportunities to learn that by doing, and the only public training courses I know on the subject are organized by that one company. You can study methods and frameworks for sure, but building a working enterprise architecture practice inside a real organization is a different challenge entirely. You need someone to show what work in real life.

This is how I have learned most of the skills that have mattered in my career: doing the work first, then using training, reading, mentors, and reflection to get better at it.

Expertise Has to Meet Demand

A skill becomes professionally valuable when it helps solve a problem that someone actually has. For consultants, that is especially concrete: ideally, it is also a problem someone is willing to pay to solve. The same basic logic applies to most expert work.

Personal curiosity still matters. It keeps learning interesting and often points you toward useful new areas. But professional development works best when curiosity meets some real demand.

There should be an overlap between what interests you, what you can become good at, what supports your existing expertise, and what organizations actually need. This does not mean jumping after every fashionable topic that appears on LinkedIn.

It means paying attention to how work is changing and where one additional skill could make your existing expertise more useful. Often, the best next capability is not a new profession at all. It simply helps you solve a more relevant problem.

Writing Expands Your Thinking

Writing has become one of the most useful ways I develop my expertise. Articles, presentations, books, and newsletters make your thinking visible, of course, but that is only part of the value.

The main reason is simple: writing forces you to check whether you actually understand what you are talking about. Trying to explain something clearly is a good test of whether you really understand it. Weak spots become visible surprisingly quickly once you have to put an idea into words.

It also pushes you to learn more. While writing, I often notice gaps in my knowledge, look into them, and come back with a better understanding than I had at the start. Just as importantly, writing helps develop your own thinking. You start connecting ideas, questioning assumptions, and forming clearer views of your own.

Publishing adds another layer of quality assurance, although the feedback is not always delivered in the most diplomatic way.

Avoid Random Growth

There is nothing wrong with learning from whatever projects and tasks happen to come your way. A lot of professional development happens exactly like that.

The problem is when, after a few years, you have collected a lot of experience but it is hard to see where it is taking you. A new client industry. One technology, then another. A transformation program. A tender. A new tool. A certification. Then the next assignment.

You have learned plenty. But what is it building toward?

One question I find useful is this:

What does this new skill connect to, and what could it help me do a few years from now?

You do not need a big career strategy. But having some direction helps. Your professional profile will change over time, and that is part of the process. What matters is having a rough idea of where you want to go and what you want to build on along the way.

Build Around What You Already Do Well

Expanding your expertise should make your professional profile stronger, not harder to understand.

The idea is not to leave your core behind. It is to build around it. You keep solving the problems you are known for, but gain more ways to approach them. You understand more of the surrounding business, can work with a wider range of people, and can contribute in more parts of the work.

This matters when you are looking for a new role or assignment too. A clear core helps people quickly understand what you are good at. Broader skills then show that you can do more than one narrowly defined task.

That is usually more useful than trying to present yourself as someone who can do a bit of everything.

For me, enterprise architecture is still the core. Around it, I have built experience in consulting business, proposal work, writing, broader business consulting, and practical use of AI.

Together, these skills make the core more useful and open up new possibilities.

📘Build Your Senior Expert Career by Design

I explore these themes further in The Senior Expert Career Playbook, a practical guide to developing your expertise, building visibility and influence, and creating a sustainable, fairly compensated expert career without moving into management.