Your Tech Skills Have a Two Year Half-Life

itwbennett writes "Eric Bloom, an IT leadership coach and former CIO, has answered that eternal question 'does working on old software hurt your professional marketability' with a somewhat surprising 'no.' But, Bloom adds, 'a techie's skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now.'"

Comments

Re:Depends...

[cyberchondriac]

I had once felt that way too, but there's a distinct difference: doctors need only keep up with advancements in medicine or new discoveries about extant biological systems: the human body itself, however, doesn't really change (not over a few millenia, anyhow). It's a relatively stationary target.
Software, OTOH, frequently changes drastically and constantly; it's engineered by man, and can be radically altered in any number of ways on whim, forcing a reinventing of the wheel sometimes even; a moving, morphing target, much of it probably driven as much as by planned obsolescence and profit as it is utter necessity. (Does Word really need to keep "evolving" to do what it does?) Sometimes I really wanna say "screw all this" and go start a goat farm.