It is the Time to Update New IT Skills

Bill Gates is a very rich man today…and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
- Dave Barry, Pulitzer prize-winning American author and columnist

It seems IT industry glamour is reducing. Increasing cost, lot of competition, technology advancements. To survive in the market there is only one solution  is to update our IT skills. Daily need to spend 1 or 2 hours to upgrade our IT skills. 

Maybe they didn't finish college, but I'll be damned if our famous (and infamous) tech captains of industry, and most of the minions who helped them get there, did one thing quite well—and that's this: they constantly strove to be bigger, better, and badder.

Badder to the bone, baby. Meaning that they acquired new skills and upgraded themselves, and they ensured that their teams did the same. These days are no exception, because those who do these things are the ones who will survive the greatest recession since the Depression.

 It's not going to be easy for them, though, as it's become more and more difficult for CIOs to find employees well-versed in ever-changing technologies like cloud computing, mobile, and big data and social analytics (which I'm going to cover at the latter chapters of the book).

According to a Bloomberg Businessweek article from 2012, "job growth since the end of the recession has been clustered in high-skill fields inaccessible to workers without advanced degrees or in low-paying industries."

If you're like me, you're probably fed up with hearing about the "war for talent." I mean, you just want a friggin' job, right? A job with other smart folk and smart chieftains who want to build and grow and stay in business. Which is why it's not really a war per se. It's a mobilization of innovation and motivated minds—the leaders, the builders, the doers, and you. It's all the combined latest and greatest skills that make up "rocket soup." 

This is the way I felt early this year as I walked through Cruzioworks from my co-working space to the restroom and I passed the packed day-long classroom on covering HTML5.

Or maybe it was jQuery. Or C#. Or PHP. Or Ruby on Rails. The times I went past the classroom when they were all on break I heard the buzz of "open source" and "cool new idea" and "the next big thing." This is all happening in the heart of Santa Cruz, the laid-back little surfing community in the backyard of traditional Silicon Valley.

Remember hearing "Silicon Beach" back in the dot-com day? That tide retreated and supposedly never came back in. Not true. It washes over me almost every day.

Skills, skills, and more skills—you may not have the means or the gumption to go back to school and complete a degree or certification, but you should consider taking special courses online, or via local community services, or paid programs to update your professional skills, or even learning on your own from others—everything from learning Flash to HTML5 to Ruby on Rails.

More than ever, it's critical to stay fresh and relevant in the marketplace you're trying to get back into, or want to stay in—to upgrade yourself—and then use those new skills to promote yourself in the marketplace. This is the time for "solopreneurs" and technical artisans—professionals whose software and hardware development and programming skills are highly specialized and in demand for today's market and tomorrow's. 

This will show you that beyond credentials, you need new skills to keep you employable. It also shows which skills are in demand, why, and how best to get them.
Mindful Moment

When's the last time you learned new IT skills? Have you investigated what employers are hiring for and why? Or are you sitting on your hands wondering where it all went wrong? Focus on getting off your hands and putting them to work.