"You can't expect that what you've become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s," said Lynda Gratton, a London Business School professor of management practice, to the New York Times. "Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google." Gratton recommends that professionals select specialties that don't lend themselves to outsourcing or automation as a hedge against rapidly improving technology.
Sites that deliver online education or training videos, such as Lynda.com, Udacity and Coursera, have seen a growth explosion since 2008 as workers take continuing education courses or retool their careers. Simultaneously, businesses have been pouring more funds into tuition reimbursement and training initiatives; Amazon's Career Choice Program is just one recent example of such a program.
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