Have you heard about the “half-life” of a skill?
– Its nothing to do with harmful radioactive elements, but its potentially very bad news for your career.

Research over the past decade has shown that the “half-life” of a learned skill is about 5 years. 

In this context, “half-life” means that half of what you learned 5 years ago is irrelevant today, and much of what you learned 10 years is obsolete.

Some skills become obsolete even quicker.

“No problems”, you say – just learn another skill, and another, and another.

But its not just learning a skill that’s important – its practice that leads to mastery – and its mastery that will help you get ahead in your career or business.

You may have heard that it takes about 10,000 hours of practicing a skill in order to achieve mastery. 

– It was Malcolm Gladwell who came up with that number in his book ‘Outliers’. 

Some people have said it takes many more hours to really achieve mastery, others have said it takes less – it all depends on the skill and context.

If we take 10,000 hours as a benchmark – and you use that skill in your job every hour of every standard working day, then it will take you about 5 years to reach that state of mastery.

Something to aim for perhaps especially since you’ll be ahead of your competition – most people give up or become distracted well before they’ve got to 10,000 hours.

But I’m sure you can immediately see the problem – whatever skill you master may only be half as useful as when you first started learning it – and it takes a long time to master it

And if you don’t learn any new skills, then you’re closer to becoming irrelevant than you realise.

– That’s somewhat demoralising.

What’s the answer?

Should you stop learning and just navigate your way through life using your inner wisdom or luck?

– I don’t think so. That’s not going to work.

I think the answer is changing the way we learn and also in how we practice our skill.

You have to somehow learn faster, broader and deeper, so that you get to mastery quicker. That’s not easy.

On top of that, thinking about how you utilise your new skills and layering these on top of your other talents becomes very important.

A case of re-invention?

You’ll have to be revolutionary in the way you’ll have to re-invent yourself.

The idea of re-inventing oneself seems both onerous and also crucial at the same time.

What do you think?

What are you doing to make sure you’ll still be relevant in 5 years time?