Beyond sharpening your existing skills comes the very real need to stay on top of career and future job requirements. The skill sets in every profession change, and in some cases they change very quickly. It's a fact of life that skill sets come with expiration dates, and like a computer, your need to upgrade can come sooner than you wish.

The best way to stay ahead of these situations is to actively develop your skills yourself, and cover areas where a new skill or technology is coming on stream. It can be an extremely good career move, as well, to get in on the ground floor of an emerging job market. The pattern in the employment industry is that a new skill set comes into the workplace, often with new technologies or market concepts, and those who get in first tend to be first to the top. Expertise is developed in the process, and the experts make the big money.

There's a very real need to keep your ear to the ground with your own job and qualifications. The workplace is evolving constantly, and if you don't evolve with it, you risk becoming a dinosaur. So your skills really do have to evolve. This is where staying ahead of the job market becomes your best option.

Evolving your skills is also easier than it might sound, when you know what to look for in your area, such as:

• Emerging trends: These are the oncoming future of your industry, and they also bring with them whole new job concepts and skills requirements.
• New products and related skills: Both of these are the current state of your job market. These are the skills that are in instant demand, and they're worth checking out as guides to future needs.
• New marketing ideas: Marketing drives products, and products drive skills requirements. They're symbiotic, and very reliable indicators of what's coming in your industry, particularly when they're significantly different from prior practices.
• Good developmental options: Developmental options are skills you can add to your existing skill set. Many of them are also closely aligned to the points above, at training level. You can get exposure to the current skills trends by training in these areas.

Important: Make the distinction between real trends and cosmetic trends. A real trend is being actually invested in, by everybody in the industry, but a cosmetic trend is really shallow; a short-term fad.

Evolving your job skills can be exciting and fun. Skills development has some built-in safeguards against becoming a grind. As you develop your skills, and branch out, you not only avoid the mundane, dreary things, but you also put yourself in a position to achieve a lot more.

For experienced people, this is a sort of recipe for job satisfaction, because the basic work isn't challenging enough. You also start seeing new opportunities, which is worth doing for its own sake.