Hmmm .. as regards IT, early on in your career, learn a skill/programming language that's popular at the time but is solid and popular enough to still be useful

Hmmm .. as regards IT, early on in your career, learn a skill/programming language that's popular at the time but is solid and popular enough to still be useful when new alternatives come out. For me, I had a 1 week Perl course and then straight into the project. 35 years later I was still writing and maintaining Perl scripts some of which I'd written at the start. Great fun!