Marketable Skills

Many, many years ago, I had lunch with one of my producers. I don't remember how the lunch came about, but I do remember, to this day, the main piece of advice this producer gave to me, advice that I think about and share everywhere I go.
 
While it was important, she said, to focus on doing a good job each day, it was equally as important to focus on the marketable skills I could learn along the way. At the time, I was probably considering training as a booth PA, a job that, at that point, I barely even understood. But since, at least at that time, people knew what a booth PA was, my training to do that job would give me a marketable skill wherever I went. If I liked it (it happened that I did), all the better, but either way, I would walk away with a skill set that could be transferred to other places. When I became an AD on OLTL, it turned out that the AD skills were also marketable--I used them to transition to prime time work as well. And the editing that I learned as part of my AD job has turned out to be perhaps the most marketable skill of all.
 
Obviously, you want to do as good a job as possible in the place where you are. Having people like you there doesn't hurt either--that will provide you with networking and references that you will undoubtedly need. But, as that producer told me all those years ago, the skills that you learn and add to your bag of tricks are sometimes the key to staying alive in a job market that is even more constantly changing now than when she gave me the advice.
 
Whether you are just starting out or deep into your career, it is never too late to start pocketing (and keeping track of) those marketable skills. You never know when they'll come in handy.