How much time do you spend staying current?
What is the shelf life on your current technical skills?
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the profession we are in changes constantly. New technologies are introduced daily. In fact, the tech industry is so prolific, that you could spend all of your time investigating new products, concepts and ideas and still not know everything that is going on.
If you don’t keep up with these new technologies, your value in the industry over time will decrease. That’s right, by simply doing nothing, you will be left behind. Suddenly you will find yourself knowing a whole lot about something no one cares about anymore.
So what are you to do? First and foremost, it is your responsibility to stay current - no one else’s. Now ideally you would like to work in a situation where your employer gives you the opportunities to gain new knowledge on the job. By all means you should look for such companies to work for.
Failing that, you have to make the commitment to yourself that you are going to stay current. This means you have to regularly allocate time to this task. You are in an industry where your value is based in a large part on the depth and breath of your knowledge in current industry technologies. Second, you are going to have to narrow down this industry to something that is manageable for an individual to consume. You can’t know everything, so you are going to have to be selective and make some calculated choices as to both what interests you and what you think will be in demand in the future.
Staying current does three things for you. First, it keeps your finger on the virtual pulse of the industry. Second, it keeps you excited about what you do for a living, and that is where you need to be emotionally to be truly successful. Third, it gives you a broad foundation of knowledge from which to draw upon when designing new systems.
At larryroof.com we demand that our employees spend time every day staying current with new technologies. We take time out of each business day to discuss new topics that our employees present; everything from hardware, to software, to third-party components and tools, to code techniques, to totally unrelated topics from other industries that employees believe play into business we are working on or are considering working in. It’s an investment that we greatly value. It’s one of the many key assets that sets us apart from the rest and makes us a truly unique consulting firm.
larryroof.com - spending the time to stay current.
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