How to Keep Tech Skills Up To Date

It may be a job seeker’s market right now, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy to land a job. Competition among talented candidates is steep, so standing out can sometimes be difficult. Those looking for a job in the tech field have the added challenge of keeping up with the industry’s ever-evolving demands. As trends emerge and technologies advance, it’s important to keep your skills sharp and up to date if you want to land a tech job.

“Innovation is accelerating so quickly in our current business ecosystem that a massive gap lies between the number of tech jobs available and the number of skilled workers who can actually fill these positions. “Furthermore, traditional higher education simply can’t keep up, leaving students to graduate college with nothing more than a diploma and debt — and without the skills needed in today’s tech job market.”

Technology is evolving at lightening speed and is forever changing the way the world works. For those of us who have made working online a way of life, it can be a struggle to stay up to date on the latest trends and skills.

Continuous learning is a must.

Here are some tips for making sure your tech skill set stays relevant:

1. Seek Online Courses and Credentials

Companies like Unanth or LinkedIn offer low-cost or free courses to help keep tech skills fresh. Students and working employees who want to upgrade their skills can choose to learn online at Your own pace.

“There are plenty of online classes that can help you not only keep current on technical topics, but even achieve technical and industry certifications,” These often include hands-on labs using virtualized environments, so the learning becomes much more practical and effective.

Taking an online course through a university can also be beneficial in that it involves collaboration and learning as a collective. This is especially important as our jobs now involve more teamwork through a computer screen with people telecommuting or holding meetings through video chat or Slack. “The online classroom environment is built on utilizing these same skills while also learning new tips, tricks, and technology to allow us to better do our jobs.”

2. Set Time Aside

Reserve time during your day to take a deep dive into something new, said Chavous P. Camp, COO and CBO of Carolina Innovative Research, Ltd. Co. “Whether it is a new piece of software, a new dev tool, new framework, or new operating system, take the time to poke around and get your hands dirty with whatever it is,” Camp said. “This, above all else, will keep your skills sharp, your knowledge fresh, and you on the cutting edge of what is going on in your side of technology, be it UI/UX or physical hardware.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day workload and not make time for what’s next. However, it helps to actually block time on your calendar to learn in some form, whether it’s reading an article, going to an event, or trying out a hands-on activity.

3. Experiment with Personal Projects

You can often learn the most by trying things out for yourself. You’ll realize that once you have a chance to work on side projects for yourself, what used to seem like magic becomes demystified. “Get yourself a Bitbucket account and take advantage of the free private repositories so you can work on tutorial projects without the fear of having to learn in front of an audience.”

If you’re a programmer, write code in your spare time for projects that you are passionate about. This will help keep your technical skills as sharp as ever.

4. Find Innovators in your space, and follow them

Follow Blogs on Unanth, subscribe to newsletters, and follow industry leaders on Twitter. If you’re not sure where to start, ask your mentors or others in your field who they follow. And if your organization subscribes to any analyst reports, see if you can get access to them.

“Not only will you learn about new technologies and trends, you’ll get a sense of which ones are generating the most interest in your industry,”. “This will help you focus; if you can only go deep on a topic or two, or your organization can only send you to one training per year, knowing what people are excited about will help you narrow down your options.”

5. Join Local Users Group Or Online Community

Whatever your technology platform or fancy might be, chances are pretty good you can find a user organization or an online community devoted to that subject. Thus, for example, in the Windows world, we find great user communities like the Windows Users Network (WUGnet) with local chapters all over the U.S. The VMware User Group community is the popular option for virtualization pros and PowerShell Community Groups can help you get in touch with other PowerShell pros in your area. Similar organizations come out of all kinds of IT specialties or focus areas, including Linux, database, information security, project management, IT governance, and on, and on. Online, options are even more amazing, where user forums and other forms of online community abound for nearly every conceivable IT specialty and platform. (You can use a similar search technique for this stuff, too.)

6. Attend Tech Conferences and Trade Shows

Industry events can often be the biggest source of insights and learning for tech pros, whether the event is linked to a vendor or centered on technology themes, said Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management and strategy at Oracle. Increasingly, smaller, informal meet-ups are also a great way to stay connected with your community of peers and glean new tech skills.

Conferences are also a great opportunity to network with peers, have questions answered, and find out how other people are solving the problems that you have.

7. Share What You Know

It’s often said that the best way to really learn something is to teach it to somebody else. Only by watching where others falter or have questions, then helping them along or providing (and properly framing answers), can you really get your mind around a subject. If you take the time and expend the energy to contribute to the body of knowledge, or to document various skills, you’ll not only be helping others find their way into subjects of mutual interest, you’ll also be improving your own skills and knowledge along the way — not to mention giving back to a community with which you presumably enjoy spending time and interacting. You can share what you know through blog posts, presentations at your local user group meeting or even within your own company’s IT department. That’s what got me started on what I do for a living today, which essentially focuses on finding topics of value, and then doing my best to absorb and deliver to others what that value might be. You can do it, too, on whatever scale or scope makes sense to you!

8. Read

It may sound simple, but reading technology news and blogs every day is one of the best ways to keep up to date on the latest trends and skills needed in tech. As people you admire professionally what books or publications they read, and start with those.

“Find a few bloggers that are relevant to your area of expertise and follow them. Find a few good technical publications to help stay current with what might be coming down the road. You can even find some blogging sites relevant to your interests. One of them may be read.unanth.com Content in this site is available in Hindi and English both. They also offer Hindi tutorial content for different technologies free of cost.

9. Hold Internal Peer Reviews

Sharing approaches with your teammates is a great way to stay ahead. Internal peer reviews — be it via code reviews or performance reviews — can be a great way to understand where you stand in terms of technical depth/quality. It can be immensely beneficial to both the employee and the company as it not only develops employee tech skills but also enhances product/company quality, it helps you set future goals and enhances decision making.