Reskilling

Of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, my personal favorite is number seven: sharpen the saw. This is a reminder to continually refresh and renew yourself in mind, body, and spirit.

I take that to heart in many forms - running, strength training, reading fiction, and also expanding or refreshing my skill set. Working in the technology industry, things move fast. There are new technologies all the time - the current attention being paid to AI and large language models (LLMs) is an example. Yesterday I was writing SQL and today I need to be a prompt engineer.

While it’s important to push forward and stay relevant - to “upskill,” it’s also important to shore up those skills you may be taking for granted - to “reskill.” I had an opportunity to practice this recently in preparation for an upcoming project. The work will involve object-oriented programming (OOP) in Python. This is something I have quite a bit of experience with but, as I thought about it, I realized it had been a few years since I had really done it. My recent Python work had mostly been light scripting to move data around. True OOP, with inheritance and abstracts and polymorphism and such, had receded a bit.

With that piece of self-awareness, I found an online course to familiarize myself with the basics again and I was glad I did. I even got to learn about data classes, which were introduced in Python 3.7 and which I’d never used.

As an aside, I found the course on LinkedIn Learning, which is available with a paid LinkedIn subscription. LinkedIn is the only social media platform I pay for and LinkedIn Learning is the reason I do it. It’s got rich content covering just about any topic you can imagine. I’m currently doing one on machine learning.

I recommend building cycles into your professional development regimen to circle back and keep the fundamentals fresh. You’ll be glad you did.

Thank you for reading.