Are Your Skills Relevant?
Knowing how to learn, un-learn, and re-learn will always remain the most fundamental skill in our ever-accelerating age — a skill that is timeless and only increases in value as the world gets more complicated. However, in terms of tangible skills that you use to put food on the table and a roof over your head, there is a bounded time value on any given skill that is dependent on both techno-economic and socio-institutional factors. Let’s explore these together.
Clusters of technologies emerge over time and these become the input-output parameters that define how all of society’s labour may be channeled. At any given point in time, numerous technology clusters are competing for dominance; due to path-dependency and lock-in effects there is always one winner that ends up defining an era — you know them from history class. Whether it’s the Age of Steam or the Age of Information, we can be certain that there is only room for one winner at any given point in time. Furthermore, we need to understand technology in terms of two domains — tools and techniques. First tools are created; user groups emerge around those tools to understand them better; user groups iteratively develop techniques that become popularized and disseminated.
Skills that are packaged and taught are the residue from this evolutionary process of technological development. With this in mind, when you think of a given skill, you need to think about the lifecycle of the technology cluster from which it derives. Learning skills near the end of a technology cluster’s lifecycle of dominance will be a terrible investment decision. Not all skills are created equal at the moment in time in which you happen to be living; the skills that are valuable to you in your lifetime will most definitely be different from those that your parents esteemed and those that your children will esteem. It is with this adaptive mindset that you must view skills: evaluate a skill by its economic utility, never by arbitrary dimensions like sentimentality. How tragic it must have been to be the sentimental carriage maker as Ford was making Fordism a concept!
One additional lens to factor in is the socio-institutional layer — I will be reductionist and simplify this to the legal domain. Skills and trades that have been around for a long time end up accumulating legislation and professional bodies that limit access to the knowledge in addition to the capacity to practice such knowledge. Moreover, participation in these established trades becomes a distinguished social credential — many will flock to said professions more for the social credentials than out of earnest desire to acquire legitimate craftsmanship in the skills in question. My individual take on this is that you should always strive to acquire the skills that are essential in a technology cluster before professionalization occurs so that you can be included by default among the thought leaders and/or leading practitioners — ride a rising tide. Additionally, you will benefit by not having had to jump through arbitrary professional examinations that were implemented mostly for market control rather than quality control.
It is through the techno-economic and socio-institutional lenses that we may assess the relevance of your skills in three general questions:
- Are you using skills from your current technology cluster? If no, are you using skills from a previous technology cluster or are you acquiring skills from an emerging technology cluster?
- Is your current technology cluster at the beginning of its lifecycle or near the end of its lifecycle?
- Did you have to pass professional examinations to use your skills? How long did it take you to be able to implement your skills in the market and would you be willing to do the process over again?
There is no need for me to illustrate this any further. It should be pretty obvious after those questions whether you are in a comfortable position or whether you need to acquire new skills relative to your point in time and the dominant technology cluster therein. Optimize for your context and don’t throw good money after bad if your investment in a certain skill paradigm is deteriorating in value — cut your losses and invest in learning the skills applicable in the increasing returns industries of your era.
Originally Posted at LevelTO.com
