To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Saturday, September 22, 2012

To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop

By SHAILA DEWAN

Over the last decade, Ty Hallock has steered his business from Web site creation to social media to mobile apps. In three more years, he expects to be back at the drawing board again.

To prepare, Mr. Hallock, 29, spends an hour or two a day at his business, TopFloorStudio in Asheville, N.C., tracking venture capitalists and start-up news, trying to divine the next frontier. He created TopFloorUniversity, where experts teach his employees and clients the latest in app development. When he could not find a good curriculum for information architecture, he and a colleague developed one themselves. As a pretext to learn from the luminaries in his field, Mr. Hallock even produces his own podcast.

“You’re always reaching for something that’s kind of like unknown, because you don’t know what is really going to be the future,” Mr. Hallock said. “I’m not in my 30s yet, and I’m sure at some point I’m going to be like, ‘Enough.’ ”

But exhaustion may be a luxury that Mr. Hallock can never afford. The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.

Going back to school for months or years is not realistic for many workers, who are often left to figure out for themselves what new skills will make them more valuable, or just keep them from obsolescence. In their quest to occupy a useful niche, they are turning to bite-size instructional videos, peer-to-peer forums and virtual college courses.

Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at the London Business School, has coined a term for this necessity: “serial mastery.”

“You can’t expect that what you’ve become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s,” she said, adding that workers must try to choose specialties that cannot be outsourced or automated. “Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.”

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