7/10/2002 -- "Field of Dreams" is one of my all-time favorite movies. I always shed a tear at the end when Kevin Costner's character gets to play catch again with his long-dead father. It contains the classic line "if you build it, he will come," which in popular usage has been corrupted to become "build it and they will come." That version of the line is now commonly used in business to mean go ahead and do want you want and the rest of the world will come to you.

So what's the relevance of this to you? Well, as a career advice columnist, I've gotten plenty of questions from readers about what the next hot technologies will be. I've come to realize that my response to many of you follows much of the same logic. In the past, in common with many career columnists, I've generally tried to stay away from picking hot technology areas and just advised people to follow their own interests. But I'm not sure now that this is always such a great idea. For example, there appear to be more than a few unemployed COBOL programmers right now who would be very happy to find another role where they could code away to their heart's content. But the market for these skills in the wake of Y2K is getting smaller and smaller. Similarly, in the early '90s, there was plenty of work for skilled OS/2 and Banyan Vines practitioners; these are no longer mainstream technologies.

We often like to use the analogy of managing ourselves at work like we would our own business, yet the world of business often demands constant analysis of itself and the changing world around it. All too often I see IT professionals behave like cats in front of a warm fire they find a nice, warm, cozy place and are happy doze off for as long as possible. With the rate of change in technology, this is a luxury we just can't afford. To stay employable, we have to spend the effort to keep current to understand how these developments can solve real business problems.

There is, of course, some level of risk in following this kind of thought process: a developing technology that you have invested some of your time in may end up as an orphan with a limited future. Even so, I think that the risk of doing nothing and getting left behind is probably greater. As you know, so many IT products and initiatives are launched with great energy and excitement yet end up going nowhere. The key to minimizing this risk is to invest your time progressively as a given product becomes more and more mainstream.

An example from my own career is Linux. When I first looked at it in 1995, I didn't have very much Unix experience (I had no idea what exactly /dev/hda1 was supposed to mean), and the distribution I used was nowhere as easy to install as those we see today. But it gave me a good idea of what Linux was about and its limitations at that time (as well as my limitations!). Then in 1999, seeing that Linux was gaining mainstream momentum, I came back to it again, and then later completed the LPI Level 1 certification in 2001. Going forward, I'm telling all of my staff that they are going to need to be conversant with both Windows 2000 and Linux, whereas five years ago I would have advised to know both Novell NetWare and Windows NT.

IT products go through a number of stages in their lifetime -- introduction, growth, maturity and decline -- and so does the demand for the skills to use these products. In my view, NetWare is in decline at the moment, and I would advise those who have specialized in this in the past to strengthen your Win2K skills (NetWare's NDS and Win2K's AD are both based on X.500 directories) and leverage these skills doing migrations from NetWare to Win2K. In the operating systems space, Win2K and Linux are the only operating systems to be growing at the moment. Two other areas that seem to be very hot right now are SANs and wireless networking.

What do you think are the hot products and technologies that we all should be looking at? Let me know by posting your comments below.