You are a trader. You trade your time and skills for a monetary compensation. How much you get compensated is directly related to how much the person you are trading with values your skills. If you aren’t getting paid enough it is because you negotiated poorly or what you were selling wasn’t valuable enough.
Sometimes, as a trader, you manage to strike a bargain with your trade partner where they pay for you to acquire new skills. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is for your benefit! Your savvy trade partner has realised that it would be cheaper in the long run for them to pay a bulk sum to get you trained up and continue to pay you the same ongoing amount than to have you go away and train yourself and come back demanding higher compensation forever and a day.
If you can manage to increase your compensation and have your trade partner pay for your skills improvement that is a truely sweet deal – a sign of good negotiation skills on your behalf!
Still – you will receive the greatest reward when you manage to acquire a new skill on your own because you can bring it to the trade table and sell it royalty free. In order to do this, and minimise your own costs you are going to need to learn how to integrate learning into everything that you do.
In the software development field there is a tendency to learn a new technology and stick to it until your skills reach obsolescence then start the cycle again. The result is a plateu effect.
Whilst it may appear the IT is continually evolving that is only because of the cumulative effect of everyones cycle overlapping. What you need to do is beat everyone else by bringing your skills to market before them, but in order to do that you need to minimise the amount of time you spend on the plateu.
How do you do it? Well I guess that is unique to everyone, but what I do is actively try to introduce new technologies into the projects that I am working on and try something different each time I do something that could be done the same way that I always did it.
Does this not introduce risk? Absolutely – but you don’t get rich in business without taking risks!