There are two major types of career skills: 1. The ability to spot trends ahead of time, understand people's problems, and come up with solutions. In other wor

There are two major types of career skills: 1. The ability to spot trends ahead of time, understand people's problems, and come up with solutions. In other words, the ability to figure out which types of skills will be valuable. 2. Deep knowledge in one or more areas, such as programming, Math, etc. For example, due to (1) I was able to figure out that Machine Learning was a valuable and growing area, pick up a book, and get into the field. Today Data Science is still a great field, but the bar to break in is higher than it was 3 years ago. My areas of deep knowledge are Math and Psychology. My deep knowledge in Math made it very easy to pick up Machine Learning/Statistics when the time was right. There were other related trends I could have followed (e.g. learning Hadoop, learning NLP) but those would have been harder since I didn't have the right background. In college, your friend should focus on building up the type of deep knowledge that will help him easily acquire related skills later on. Generally speaking, it's helpful to take high-level, general courses as opposed to courses that focus on the tool of the day. For example, a course on Algorithms is more useful than a course on Python. As he advances, he should start paying more attention to industry trends. Eventually he'll get to the point where he can realistically understand the major problems in the industry, and quickly pick up the skills that let him solve those problems.