Maintaining your core skills

N2IT

Just curious if you set aside time to continue to work on your core skills. Think of what got you were you are.

I find myself reading books and learning new subjects but never getting to far from SQL, first of all I still have a ways to go, you always can get better and any potential job in the future is going to requirement to have advance skills at least intermediate.

Sometimes it feels redundant but I know I have to keep going at it. I utilize this skill at my job almost every day so it makes sense to keep at it.

Do you find yourself doing this at all?

DevilWAH

I think my core skills are Cisco networking still.. But I have covered so many areas of IT now so i don't think about it as core skills any more, more core fundamentals.

Networking is a good example of this I think, I know the core fundamentals of networking and while I could concentrate on Cisco's way of doing things I am finding these days that the old idea of a switch and router is a bit old fashion. and if I under stand networking as a concept than I can jump some thing like virtulisation that now has parts of networking with in it and be able to work my way around.

With technology changing so quick now I think its important to study the technology's that will allow you to be flexible in the future as well as what is being used currently. I remember when access was all the rage for small in house development, a lot of good access people ended up pigeon holed and almost forgotten when they tried to make access fit problems when there where much better and newer solutions coming along. The people who did good where the ones who know about databases and data structure and could apply that to the best solution at the time for the job at hand.

elTorito

I try to. Just like a blade needs honing, I find myself going back to the basics every now and then. I skip the stuff that you'd normally try to memorise when you're studying for a cert, though. There's Google for that. The concepts are the most important.

paul78

I don't really think of it of maintaining but more of expanding skills. For me, it's mostly out of curiosity and frankly just to keep sharp. I guess it depends on what you think of as core skills. Most of the time that I set aside isn't directly related to what I do in my job.

In many cases, I like to use and explore technologies which are not used at my job. Mostly, because I actually enjoy fiddling with different technologies. Being in management, I don't really have much hands-on work (unless you count outlook, excel and powerpoint ) So the time that I set aside for my own amusement is priceless to me.