hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is so good to have you here one of the most frequent questions i see with respect to servicenow careers is should i go wide or deep i'm not going to give you any of the it depends type answer i'm going to give you the full throttle truth with love courtesy of the duke go deep god are the days when you can walk into a client and say greetings mortals it is i the certified servicenow admin now lay down your offerings of gold and precious gems there are a lot more people in the servicenow ecosystem and thus tighter competition on skill going wide is the exclusive purview of years of experience or genius level skill acquisition look the only reason you're asking is because you want a richer financial reward which is awesome but that comes with expertise expertise requires time so why load up on more skills to be amateur at pick a topic and go deep to create the fastest line to expertise once you achieve expertise then worry about widening or deepening but go deep first let's talk about time for a minute how much time does it take to get expertise and i'm not going to pull punches here getting capable can take weeks as you ingest course materials and study the tool but what you miss are lessons you can only get through field experience what parts of the tool actually scale what parts are still maturing what parts are edge cases how does a given process area actually talk getting expertise takes a year of concentrated experience minimum and make no mistake that's what customers really want most of the botched implementations i've seen are because one an itsm savvy servicenow implementer didn't understand life in a different process area or two a certified resource that didn't have the requisite field experience next time you see a servicenow profile that has more certifications than years in the field you're looking at either a super genius or someone with too little field experience to matter which is more likely at this point you might say but robert you go wide yes i do but i've been at this for 13 years at the very start i committed to reading community and product documentation for 30 minutes every workday that's 1200 hours and over half a year of concentrated learning what i did in my spare time over 12 years would take you years just to catch up and even now there's whole parts of the platform i just flat out ignore even now all these years later i'm leaning into areas i excel at and ignoring the rest the good news is you have way more advantages than i did when i started when i started servicenow the only games in town were itsm and custom apps and a lot less of the latter than you'd imagine today not only are there a wide variety of process areas but a very tall stack of technologies too do you like process specific solutions you've got itsm hr itbm secops grc financial close and csm all of those are different enough from each other to spend years without overlap do you like the technology side discovery service mapping virtual agent machine learning iot service portal and the emerging ui builder flow designer each of these techs has enough breadth to be a specialization all on their own there's hundreds of niches you can get the experience in quickly than when i was starting who knows where your journey will take you but start it right go deep on one element of the platform first don't worry about going wide there's absolutely no way you can learn the whole platform at this point anyway at least not in any way that matters for customers seeking expertise i remain yours truly the duke if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching