As I was looking to build career goals for the new year, I think mostly about technical topics. That makes sense, given my focus and job, but I ran across an interesting thread on Hacker News that asked about skills to work on in 2020, and not necessarily technical ones.
I did find it interesting that one of the first comments was self improvement, and quite a few comments on cooking, both as a skill to learn and a way to save money. There are plenty of comments on other non-technical skills, but since this is a technical site, I wanted to focus there.
We’re over a third of the way into the year, and we’re dealing with a pandemic. Business is slow, many people have lost employment, and it’s possible many more will. Fewer companies are hiring, so there is a need to stand out more if you find yourself looking for a new job.
With that in mind, what types of things would you work on if you knew you’d need a new job by the end of the year. Let’s say that you have seven months to prepare to look for a new job on Jan 1. What would you work on?
Leave a comment and let us know today.
Steve Jones
Voice of the DBA 
I’d focus on Azure.
really interesting question. the skills you acquire need to be marketable and aligned with the job market as ultimately they are there to pay the bills.
i’d like to learn some non-tech stuff though, i.e. joinery – you never know when you might need a ‘side hustle’.
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I’d agree that skills need to be marketable, but that can be a lot of things. Azure, AWS, Power BI, performance tuning, there are lots of choices here. The first two alone can be a huge array of choices of what to learn.
I use the side skills to get away from work, and enjoy life more, or differently. I do some woodworking, but not sure I want to do that full time.
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All good points 🙂 When I said i’d focus on Azure I meant in that situation i’d personally do that given my current skill set – It may have come across as one-size-fits-all career advice!
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