Although I agree in principle with the many comments about reinventing one's self, it's easier said than done. And often times it requires moving.
I was a systems engineer for 25 years for a Fortune 100 company in Silicon Valley. Simply reinventing yourself on a new technology within the company was a difficult thing to do.
In my business we had the high tech job hopper types with no loyalty to anyone other than themselves. They'd get hired and finally learn their jobs, only to leave the company to pursue some other new technology. The result was a broad based, but mediocre skill set. These job hoppers never mastered anything. In my experience job hoppers were never assigned complicated, critical work - because they weren't skilled enough to take on the task. They may have known how the technology "worked when it was working", but they didn't know squat when it didn't work because of some hardware failure, software bug, or configuration issue.
And to think the likes of factory workers at, say, the AC Delco spark plug plant in Detroit were a bunch of untrainable, dead enders who should have reinvented themselves is blatantly unfair. Those people showed up every day and did the job they were told to do. Their reward? Poverty.
Scott
