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The Technology Nightmare
Let me guess one of your recurrent nightmares. You're looking at the want ads just to see if there's anything interesting, and you find that they all read like this:
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Must have minimum five year experience in the following:
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"Who are they kidding - some of those technologies didn't even exist five years ago. I know a couple of them, but most of them are new to me and some I don't even recognize"
It's a fact of life that technology moves at a terrifying rate - in the space of months a new technology will appear in a conference, get a following in the technology blogs, appear in an O'Reilly book, and become an industry standard that you must know to be competetive. And just as rapidly, it falls out of favor and is never heard of again.
Keeping up with technology is a little like running the Red Queen's Race: you have to run as hard as you can just to stay in one place and if you want to get ahead you have to run twice as fast. It's no wonder that most programmers are terrified that they'll become technologically obsolete and unemployable overnight.
Don't fret, here's how I can help:
- Choose an area of specialization, so you don't have to be an expert on everything.
- Form a learning plan to catch up to the technology, and stay caught up.
- Decide which technologies have staying power, and which are fads.
- Identify local training resources like conferences and workshops.
- Identify on-line learning resources - both free and paid.
- Plan how to get your company to support your training.
- Learn how to become a very efficient learner.
With a little coaching, you can get back to competencies in the most important technologies, and then get on a program to keep your knowlege current.