Looming obsolescence is scary.

Consider skills in 3 camps:
Portable - can use in any industry, any stack, any company.
Nonportable - specific to a company’s products & practices
Semiportable - stack, platform, tool, language

Value to your present company probably is (mostly) an inversion of portability. The “most fit” is to excel in the least portable skills, though there is value in portable skills also.

But your value to the broader market has little to do with how well you know, and can navigate and modify, the current company’s product.

But your value in semi-portable skills is pretty huge. You know how to use cloud tech, testing frameworks, libraries and frameworks for coding? That’s big. More likely to be hired for your resume having those semi-portable skills.

Your truly portable skills will eventually be your runway to success at higher levels of more companies. In your current job, they’re moderately valued. They won’t get your resume in front of a CEO today. Someday maybe, but not soon. You gotta thrive until then.

In the meantime, millions of people are inventing millions of new things, new toys, new tech, new ways to organize and manage tech, new frameworks, new languages. Nobody could keep up.

So do you work on the portable skills, the semi-portable, or the nonportable? Do you want to focus on being the best right now in your spot, the best with a stack, the best at working without nonportable and with few semi-portable?

Do you chase the new shiny?

Today my team’s lean coffee question was “how do you keep up with technology” — the idea of portable and nonportable skills came up. The idea of looming obsolescence came up. FOMO came up — not knowing what struggles we needlessly have that new tech solves.

You — what do you invest in? Where are you looking? How do you balance value at work (nonportable), value in your community of practice (semi-portable), value to your eventual future (portable)?

Curious. Asking.