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I have just read Paul Gregory’s guest post for the TechNet Flash, and the two things that caught my eye was to be bi-lingual and to keep your skills up to date.  I put these two themes together and came up with the title for this post which essentially means being skilled in more than one technology.  As we move into a world where some of the nuts and bolts are automated or outsources away from us then having a set of skills that can bridge technologies is going to be more valuable. In you own case I think of two ways this works:

  • I am pretty good on SQL Server especially BI, such that I could still have that on my cv with some confidence, however more recently I have been focusing on Windows Server and System Center and my SQL background has really helped with this. For example in my Evaluate This series I used a SQL Server workload to show Hyper-V Live Migrations, SQL Server running on a Storage Space and running SQL in Windows Server core.
  • I have a pretty good knowledge of VMware (I am a lowly VCP5) and  I have MCSE Private Cloud,  This means I understand enough to be able to speak VMware and articulate the world of Hyper-V to VMware experts. 

This ability to cross technologies comes into play with integration if you know how to get product X to integrate with solution Y, and with migration I want to move from vendor 1 to vendor 2.  Those kinds of projects are always going on and have a number of advantages over other kinds of IT work:

  • You are respected as the expert and you can’t buy respect you can only earn it
  • The work is more challenging so having the skills isn’t enough you need to also (to Paul Gregory's post) relate to users and other technical teams. 
  • The day rates are higher, because the combination those two skills are rare.

So while it’s quiet over the summer holidays (unless you are in education IT in which case you have my complete respect!) start having a look at some new stuff be it Windows Server 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 or have another look at the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA)