Make the future your bitch

Change. It's something that's ongoing and inevitable. People can try to stop change but in reality all they are doing is postponing it. The people that failed to learn how to use computers in the 1980s and early 1990s are officially on the outside looking in. My oldest sister-in-law fits in that category. It's a recipe consisting of two parts stubbornness and one part ineptitude.

Other changes are inevitable as well. I was reading this story about the impending development boom along the last stretch of undeveloped freeway frontage in the Twin Cities stretching from Interstate 494 to Hudson, Wisconsin and the analogy there is that one small town (Lake Elmo) has had so much in-fighting that they have wasted four years that could have been used to prepare for the inevitable and Supreme Court ruled expansion. But, as I said, they pissed away four years postponing what most everyone had to know, at least in some part, was going to happen.

Delaying the inevitable, though, isn't restricted to only people and short-sighted towns in Minnesota. The past few years have shown us that media companies would rather file lawsuits than work to embrace change and make the future their bitch as opposed to being made the bitch. Layoffs run rampant locally and nationally at a plethora of media companies. They failed to see what was coming and are now forced to play catch up. Those employees whose salaries were deemed to be too bloated were cut loose. Those employees who themselves had failed to embrace new technology and failed to contribute new ideas are viewed as expendable.

The lesson here is not to try and see the future but inform yourself, don't get far behind and blaze your own trails. If you do those things while contributing to the greater conversation, you are at least less likely to find yourself in the unemployment line. But these are just my tips and experiences. What have you done in your job to better prepare yourself in the face of change? What skills have you added that you didn't have half a decade ago?