What new skills have you learned on your own time in the last six months?

If you’re like many IT peo­ple, you may be defer­ring to your boss when it comes to career devel­op­ment. Per­haps your com­pa­ny is ready to imple­ment a new Share­Point site and you’ve been immersed in that project for the last six months. Great. But have you been keep­ing your eye on indus­try trends on what skills are emerg­ing and those that are wan­ing? I sus­pect most peo­ple work­ing it IT would say “no.”

The June 4th edi­tion of Com­put­er­World mag­a­zine argues that com­pa­nies have lots of job open­ings but there are still many IT work­ers who are strug­gling to land jobs. The rea­son? A skills gap. The jobs are there but work­ers’ skills are not.

Todd Wein­man, a recruiter quot­ed in the arti­cle, said: “You can’t rely on a com­pa­ny for your growth and train­ing anymore…Except for a few enlight­ened com­pa­nies, if they’re train­ing you at all, they’re train­ing you for what they need, not nec­es­sar­i­ly train­ing for what you need to devel­op your tech­ni­cal skills over the long run.”

Employ­ers are clam­or­ing for can­di­dates with exper­tise in mobile app devel­op­ment, cloud com­put­ing, and busi­ness ana­lyt­ics, accord­ing to the arti­cle. But employ­ees may be tired of the self-devel­op­ment treadmill—especially if they are work­ing more than 50 hours per week.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, here are some sug­ges­tions for thriv­ing in IT in the com­ing years:

* Cre­ate your own train­ing plan. Accord­ing a recent arti­cle pub­lished by the Har­vard Busi­ness Review, set aside a few hours each week on career development.

* Pur­sue train­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions on your own time and at your expense. On a relat­ed note, I recent­ly read a book called the Six Fun­da­men­tals of Suc­cess by Stu­art R. Levine. Levine writes: “Take con­trol of your con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion and per­son­al growth.  Every six months, give your­self spe­cif­ic learn­ing goals…Too often peo­ple wait for their boss to tell them what skills they need. This is a stun­ning abdi­ca­tion of responsibility.”

* Devel­op soft skills, like com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

* Iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent class­es of skills. Which tech­nolo­gies are emerg­ing, main­stream, and or lega­cy? Does your cur­rent exper­tise have a long future ahead of it? If not, what cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and train­ing do you need?

Here’s my take on it. I’ve worked about 15 years in IT and work­ers who enjoy learn­ing and are moti­vat­ed to learn appear to do bet­ter in the work­place. In con­trast, those employ­ees who decide to go on “career cruise con­trol” become vul­ner­a­ble dur­ing lay­offs because their skills are per­ceived to be “rusty.”

Obvi­ous advice? Per­haps. But many work­ers don’t seem to fol­low it. What do you think about this issue?

Check out the Com­put­er­World arti­cle.