How To Stay Relevant in a Finance Career?

[Andy Nguyen]

NYT has an interesting article on how workers in many industries have to keep training to stay relevant given how rapid technology development has really changed everything.
How would finance professionals stay relevant? What online resources, training would help them learn the latest developments in their field?
One of the most popular questions on QuantNet is "what is the technical skills I need to know a few years from now". It's really hard to say.
On the other hand, do you feel that finance is changing as fast as other industries? I don't have a sense that any current technical skills you have today will be outdated 3 years from now.

 

[bigbadwolf]

On the other hand, do you feel that finance is changing as fast as other industries? I don't have a sense that any current technical skills you have today will be outdated 3 years from now.

What is the set of technical skills that a quant has? Has anyone ever attempted to define this?

The whole idea of a sound fundamental education is that it (ideally) provides a flexible framework and context for learning new things, which both fit into and alter the framework.

My feeling is that hardcore coding knowledge and skills will remain relevant, and will provide the framework through which one can acquire new skills and new knowledge. For example, an in-depth understanding of C++ will be of use in picking up another similar language as one knows what to expect of in an imperative/object-oriented language, and where the enhancements and nuanced differences lie. But without this hard-won conceptual framework, learning new things will lack context and meaning, treating one's memory like RAM to be successively emptied of, and filled with, an ocean of detailed and unstructured content.

I'm more ambivalent about quant math -- underlying disciplines like measure-theoretic probability will remain relevant and again provide a conceptual framework but I'm not so sure about whole swathes of more specialised finance math topics.

The way the popular press deals with technical and scientific change has us appear as robots whose memories can be flushed clean of old skills and knowledge and filled with new (but equally transient) skills and knowledge. One set of vocational skills is replaced with another, and education seemingly is stripped of its old meaning and significance. This notion of unstructured and manic change is reminiscent of Toffler's old book, "Future Shock."

 

[Dave Haan]

I too found the article irrelevant and uninteresting.
Not so the questions Andy raises.
Yes, C++ or the like not so much Java esp not VBA despite
http://mathbabe.org/2012/09/18/two-rants-about-hiring-a-data-scientist/#comment-10756
which of course brings up SQL ... and NoSQL
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html
A scripting language (Python or Perl)
And some familiarity with Matlab or Mathematica, and R.
So why am I talking the stat and big data stuff? cuz sampling MCMC frinstance, and calibration against tickfeeds, and and and ...