@scottalanmiller MSPs do not provide great opportunity for advancement near as appealing as a solid SMB does for Internal IT. As you stated, and it is the same for Enterprise, both are very focused upon efficiency and staying active. Neither of those anywhere leaves much room for anything else but repetition. The argument is back-asswards, because Enterprise IT is concerned with efficiency and repeatability, not creativity. MSPs are concerned with efficiency and customer density, not creativity or versatility unless they are pretty explicitly to improve efficiency or density. Both are cold places for anyone who doesn't already know what they want to specialize in, because both are all about specialists, and people who like them only care about specializations. Enterprises suffer from their size, because while they might be efficient, they're very rarely particularly creative, because doing anything quickly or with a high amount of change is increasingly difficult the larger the scale becomes.
The problem is very similar to what my father often remarks about college degrees in the fields where they're actually important like engineering, and polymer science. The statement goes a bit like this: People with Bachelors Degrees know a little about a lot of things. People with Masters Degrees know a lot about a few things. People with PHD's know so much about one thing that they can hardly understand anything else. Specialization is generally at the expense of versatility, not in any way an automatic compliment. Generalists make better specialists than the inverse, because Generalists already know a broad variety of things. Specialists can do one thing very well, and the more specialized they are, the more they are likely to know about their specialty, and typically the less they know about what is outside of it unless they have to directly interact on a frequent basis. Take them outside of their specialty, and ask them to do something unrelated..... good luck, because the longer they operate in their specialty, the more likely they will forget more and more outside of it, no differently than IT generalists doing highly specialized work.
For task that span a variety of disciplines with IT takes one decent guy a few hours to do by themselves in an SMB, you may end up having to get multiple individuals to accomplish it through an MSP who has to share every single individual in the organization with multiple other organizations, which actually means that the whole process gets done far faster, for a lot less money, and arguably no less effectively by your generic SMB IT admin in many cases. Sure, the SMB Admin may have to spend more time researching before doing the job... but between Google, Youtube, and a handful of IT support sites, there's extremely little that an Admin for an SMB can't do just as well or better for their organization than an MSP can. The thing is, most SMBs don't need any great level of specialization to do what they need to do... so... why hire an industrial, high-voltage substation maintenance technician to wire up some regular old electrical outlets and light switches? Most SMBs don't need a specialist, which is why most SMBs don't hire them. MSPs are absolutely valuable, but it's arrogant to suggest that SMBs shouldn't hire their own IT or they're bad businesses where IT is concerned. Maybe you just don't understand their IT needs well enough to understand why your opinion is incorrect?
MSP infrastructure is only a benefit if the SMB's needs actually align with the MSPs configuration. A specialist by definition doesn't get variety lol, if they get variety, then they're not specialists.. so no, your statement about MSP specialists getting variety is absolutely false unless you're talking about the capacity to change specialties within the organization, which every IT Generalist in every SMB does already, so not a pro there. There's a variety of specializations available in an MSP, but no different than in an Enterprise.. there's absolutely zero guarantee you will ever get to switch out of the specialization you are in. As previously stated, Enterprises and MSPs are focused on efficiency, not what their staff want to do so much. If you're good at what you do, they are all going to weigh the loss of your good job at what you do, with what you might be able to accomplish in another role. Whether or not you are allowed to move isn't going to be much different either way, where in an SMB, there was never even a question there... the IT staff does it, period. So I'm not really certain how it is that MSP laborers somehow get to do more as specialists than SMB as generalists. A Specialist by definition will never see as much variety as a generalist.
It feels to me like the problem is a lack of appreciation for generalists. I'de point out, that most of the best folks in an organization aren't specialists, but generalists. They tend to know a little about a lot, which also includes knowing when to talk to specialists about specialized things. The two both have their places, which interestingly enough seem to be with generalists either being near the top of the totem pole, or near the bottom (with pay to match) while specialists fill in most everything in between.
This is literally the argument of how you advance from SMB IT to MSP IT. You cannot advance from doing everything, while as MSP IT, you will never do that, therefor there is a logical path for advancement.