Where did you get the 500 programs number? Just Curious.
In my opinion, as generic as this sounds I believe some of the best employees are “t-shaped.” I would be surprised to find an ID’er who didn’t have at least a baseline knowledge of those things as they seem very necessary. Some of the best designers in history were extremely multi-disciplinary, that doesn’t mean they were any less of ID’ers. Charles and Ray Eames, Massimo Vignelli, Karim Rashid, Marc Newson, Jasper Morrison, Philippe Starck, The Bouroullec Brothers, the list goes on. Plus, why wouldn’t you want to continue to learn?
“If you can design one thing, you can design everything” - Massimo Vignelli
And if an ID’er can’t make a model, how do they test their ideas?
T-Shaped People:
“The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce. The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.” -The Wikipedia