Let me turn that question around a bit. Part of the art of being a successful solution provider is having the expertise to identify a problem in the first plac

Let me turn that question around a bit. Part of the art of being a successful solution provider is having the expertise to identify a problem in the first place. Usually that comes from having a lot of experience in that industry already. I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but bear in mind that you have a bunch of saleable skills (otherwise you wouldn't have thought of this already) and you're willing to apply those skills in helping people who are willing to pay for them. Also, we have a tendency to ignore the things we're already good at in favour of the things we've most recently become good at, so when you start narrowing your focus and zoning in on problems you want to solve, you might ignore some of the things people might find most valuable in your skillset, however long ago and intellectually uninteresting to you those skills are. Remember, solving business-level problems is more about your overall viewpoint of the industry and how its bits fit together, not about tickling your own brain with this month's interesting JS framework. So, as a really bad example, you might have written a bunch of task scheduling/interleaving code to drive PLCs on a production line a few years back, and that might not be interesting to you anymore, and you might also have become really good at hooking Hibernate up to replace a bunch of badly-handwritten SQL after that, and again, that's not interesting anymore. But, if you really know automation and enterprise app ORM, you might suddenly find something that people are willing to pay for.