The first article in the January-February 2025 Harvard Business Review is titled, “Learning Emerging Skills Doesn’t Always Pay Off” and it has a nugget of a quote about focusing on core skills:

A recent Gartner survey of 3,375 employees found that training workers in the core skills essential to their roles right now has five times more impact on their performance than teaching “emerging” skills that don’t have a clear here-and-now application.

Core skills depends on the position, but the point is that ensuring you have a strong foundational base for your chosen area is better than reaching for emerging skills. This seems like common sense, but I have seen plenty of cases where personnel are sent to training on the latest, cutting edge topics rather than ensuring they are well-grounded in what they need for their day-to-day jobs. The reality is that the better our foundations, the more we’re able to get done in those day-to-day tasks.

So if you’re looking to upskill yourself, do a skills inventory of what you are expected to do in your position (even if it’s not a normal activity in your current job) and see if you have any gaps. For instance, if you do any kind of administration work on Windows-based systems, how are your PowerShell skills? If you’re a DBA, do you know the backup/restore options for your platforms and are you proficient in implementing them and understanding what to use when? The name of the game is performance and execution. The better you are at that, the more you open the door for opportunities.