Technical Skills Can Do You Wrong

And make sure that possessing certain technical skills doesnt hold you back. You may need to lose those skills. One day while I was at IBM as a senior systems engineer, my SE manager called me in to review my annual programming skills report. IBM kept a skills inventory of each employee and had the employee and his manager update it annually. That allowed IBM to match employees with needed support requirements. It also helped managers determine the level of an employees technical competence and decide whether he needed more education in a specialty.

My manager wanted to know what had happened to my previously listed technical competency in the IBM System/370 CICS macro-level Assembler language, because he had a need for that skill. I told him, gone forever. I had a plan to move on and up, and keeping up old technical skills would have stopped that from happening.