The road ahead.
After a lot of thought, I have decided on a career strategy.
I still think my main strength is, and always will be, my technical skills.
I am going to keep improving those, on the job and off the job.
I DO need to learn additional ‘soft skills’ - the main one being presentation skills - I need to get comfortable presenting my technical development/research in front of an audience. This is a skill that will be needed even in the most hardcore of technical fields, such as research labs - you still need to present your findings.
I will probably also need to learn how to run my own business, at least in the long-term future, and this will involve getting ‘savvy’ about a number of business-related things.
But ultimately I’m a technologist, and yes - many people may earn more than me with excellent sales, consulting and soft skills, but ultimately, I do believe that there will always be a place - probably not in the highest paying roles at all.. probably not in the ‘best’ environments - but there will always be a place for an engineer that keeps improving their technical skills throughout their life.
LinkedIn is full of ‘people skills heavy’ marketeers and people influencers, and that is fine and good, but honestly a lot of the more technically competent (and highly employable) people I’ve worked with avoid LinkedIn like the plague - they just have no interest or need for it.
At the end of the day, learning technical skills is what I enjoy, what I do in my spare time anyway, and what I’d do if I didn’t have to worry about a career at all. And any technical skills that I learn on the job or for my career, are easily transferable into my own personal/hobby projects so I benefit from them twofold.
Yes - those technical skills MAY radically change - at the moment I’m upskilling on machine learning/AI and cyber security - but they are still ultimately ’technical’ skills, just different ones from the ones that have been in demand before.
I have proven that I can easily master radically different technical skills in middle-age (I’m 44), through my academic grades and hobby projects, and so it is more about the ‘mindset’ you choose to adopt - the key one is to keep on learning.