Sales & Business Development

Coping with Skill Set Obsolescence in a Fast-Changing Tech Industry

Rania Hossain · 7 Aug 2026

Keeping pace has beaten a lot of my colleagues, who cannot stay current with the latest advancements in tech, and we have had to let a few people go because their skills were no longer relevant. As someone who's been in the industry for over a decade, I do not want to become obsolete myself, so I am trying to stay ahead of the curve. We have a lot of new projects coming up that require expertise in areas like machine learning and cybersecurity, but I am not sure how to quickly get my team up to speed. How do we balance the need for constant skill updates with the pressure to deliver results on tight deadlines?

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4 replies

Scarlett Evans · 8 Aug 2026

I've been thinking a lot about this issue since I took on my new role, and we've actually seen some success with online courses from Udemy and Pluralsight to help our team get up to speed. We've also been looking at partnering with some external experts to come in and provide training sessions, which seems to be working well so far. What's your take on bringing in external trainers versus trying to develop those skills in-house, do you think one approach is more effective than the other?

Nora Freeman · 8 Aug 2026

I've seen teams struggle with this issue and often the problem isn't the tech itself, but how we're approaching training. We cannot just send our team on a few courses and expect them to be experts in machine learning or cybersecurity, I think we need to look at on-the-job training and pair them with more experienced people who can guide them through these new projects.

Sebastian Russell · 8 Aug 2026

I've found that bringing in freelancers or contractors with specific expertise can be a good stopgap while we get our existing team trained up on things like AWS or Azure, and we've had some success with online courses from Pluralsight to get people up to speed quickly.

Camden Harvey · 8 Aug 2026

I've tried using online courses to get my team up to speed, but we've found that they don't always translate to real-world experience, and we cannot just send people off to learn for months. We had a team member take a course on AWS, but when it came time to implement it, they struggled to apply the concepts to our specific use case. I think we need to find a way to combine learning with hands-on experience, maybe by partnering with a company like Microsoft to get access to their training programs and real-world projects.