by Bill Cushard (@BillCush), ServiceRocket Training Team

In December, we started work with a new customer helping them write a certification exam for an emerging technology. It is a new technology that is being used mainly by innovators, committers, and early adopters. The test is aimed at later adopters learning a new technology, and of course to help the company cross the chasm by extending adoption to a larger audience of technology professionals.

The technology is so new that the few books and websites that exist have wrong or irrelevant information about it. Even the official documentation has outdated sections. The technology is just moving so fast.

So in preparation for this project, I had to learn fast, and assemble of team of people who knew this emerging technology. As I began writing exam questions, I quickly needed help writing more advanced questions. I wrote a company-wide blog post seeking help from anyone with experience in this technology. I was surprised to find 8 people volunteer who had experience using it. They helped to write some good, difficult questions using code snippets.

The point is that I was inspired by the fact that we have people at ServiceRocket who are constantly learning new skills and are willing to share what they know. We do not use this new technology to create our own products, so there is no specific, urgent, and direct need for anyone at ServiceRocket to learn it. But that is not the point. We know that if we do not keep up with these new skills, we will fall behind. Quickly. So we keep learning.

The truth is, in early December, I was in a meeting with developers discussing a new product. The lead developer asked the group, “Why aren’t we using [this new technology] to build this?” So it is already happening.

If we did not have anyone at ServiceRocket who knew this technology, we might not have earned this work or the opportunity to create a relationship with such a cool and emerging company.

So we keep learning. Fast.

What is one new skill you will you learn in 2014? Git? JIRA Agile? OpenStack? Data Science? How to build a mobile app? A Salesforce.com app? A JIRA Add-on? Whatever it is, it better be something, and it better be more than one thing. Because as fast as things move, one new skill might not be enough. In fact, Rebecca Hiscott at Mashable says I need to learn 10 programming languages in 2014. Yikes!