Skills atrophy after 20 years at one job

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

An interesting comment at Hacker News:

My work history is peppered mostly with companies of less than 20 people, and a good chunk of it at companies under 10. However, the job or two I have had — and the interactions I’ve had with comparable consulting clients — in places structurally describable as “enterprise” left me with an enormous appreciation of how differently a lot of the labour force there operates. Most of the people I worked with were strict 9-to-5ers of average intelligence who, over time, became highly knowledgeable, deeply entrenched maintenance experts in various legacy systems the company had, which in many cases dated back to the late 1980s; ROI is ROI. They were quite valuable to those companies, operationally.

However, they had been there 9, 10, 15, 20 years; they had virtually no transferrable skill sets whatsoever. When that technology does (did) go, so will their jobs, and they will (do) have an extremely difficult time finding another job in a competitive technology market at any place that does not specifically use those systems. Even the folks who played more generally applicable roles like accounts payable analysis, audits, marketing, etc. often became idiosyncratic domain specialists in that very company’s very particular business process and very particular product and customer domain in ways that seemed to call into doubt their ability to shift into an analogous role in another place in time and space.

Post external references

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    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1707862
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