Every one of us constantly hear pearls of wisdom from our managers, colleagues, family and friends – well, almost all of them mentioning “You should constantly learn – There is a bit of learning in everything and from everyone – Learning gives your flexibility …….” . Shifting from a domain specific finance role to ‘Enterprise Applications’ consulting exactly mid-way thru my career and spending close to 2+ decades thereafter thought of sharing my thoughts on the topic as an IT professional.

While accepting a need for learning (either forced or otherwise!) in all fields some challenges that may well be considered as unique to the “IT” domain are:

• Learning transforms to earning at a much faster pace – Simply stated, knowledge is money!
• The unprecedented pace of change – Even foundational structures may change!
• Diverse dimensional changes – Version, features, service models, architecture, user interface, etc., – Quite a challenge to deal with multiple aspects at one go!
• Lost in the wind – Over the years there are a host of applications that have disappeared – Constant pressure to acquire and enhance skills in relatively ‘safer’ domains.
• More is less – The more one becomes experienced there are lesser chances of survival due to the availability of enhanced skills at a lesser cost unless one stays relevant to the organizational needs.

There could potentially be many more distinct aspects w.r.t “IT”. However, one could consider some useful ‘Learning’ strategy for improved career longevity from the points listed below – i.e.,:

• ‘Objective Oriented Learning’ – Focused on the way forward and how to leverage must be clear – Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is of no use!
• Be prepared to deep dive with lots of patience and willingness to explore – This applies equally to technical and domain application specialists – Being a first mover may be difficult – However, if this is relevant for your organization – go all out to learn!
• Learn what interests the organization NOT what interests you! – Unless one has a vision and clear direction to charter way forward.
• Expand your learning horizon – Eg. If you are finance professional explore something in supply chain
• Develop interest to know and appreciate technology at a high level – With domain specialization blending technology will help to communicate better with end-users.
• Learn absolutely unrelated subjects as risk protection! – In the days to come, this will be key to longer professional survival – (sometimes during my commute to the office through an area with lots of film shoots I always used to think how better it would be to acquire some skills relevant to Cinema – from a spot boy to focus puller to cinematographer! – Though I achieved none of these!!) – As one can see, technology business may be adversely impacted by business cycles but ‘Entertainment’ stays forever! – Moral of the story is – Be smart to learn and build skillsets in evergreen domains!

Let me conclude this random thought with a hearty thanks for your patient read. Hope this makes some sense professionally! Will connect soon with yet another topic!!