Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / How Skill Obsolescence Unlocks Your Next Growth Phase
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this idea that I've been turning over in my head for a few weeks, and I think it might be one of those uncomfortable truths about careers: sometimes the fastest way to grow is to deliberately let a skill die. Luna: Let a skill die — that sounds almost heretical in a world that's constantly telling us to upskill and reskill. Lucas: Exactly. We're programmed to treat our skill set like a garden — always watering, always weeding in the sense of adding more. But gardens also need pruning. And pruning means cutting something back that's still alive, because you know it's not the branch that's going to bear fruit next season. Luna: I like that metaphor. So what does that look like in practice? Are we talking about something like, I don't know, a graphic designer who stops using an old version of Photoshop because they've moved to a new tool? Lucas: Yeah, that's the idea, but I want to go a step further. I'm thinking about a specific case: a marketing manager I know — let's call her Priya — who worked at a mid-size consumer goods company. She was known as the Excel person. She could build nested formulas, pivot tables, macros — she was the go-to for any reporting task. Luna: Oh, I know that type. The Excel wizard. That's a valuable reputation. Lucas: Valuable, but also a trap. Because Priya realized that being the Excel person meant she was always the one asked to produce reports, not the one asked to interpret them. Her company was moving toward Tableau and Power BI for visualization, and she saw that her Excel fluency was actually keeping her in a lower-value role. So she made a decision: she stopped opening Excel for any task that could be done in Tableau. Cold turkey. Luna: That's bold. Didn't that slow her down at first? I imagine the learning curve on Tableau is steeper if you're used to Excel shortcuts. Lucas: It did slow her down — for about three weeks. She had to look up basic functions, she made ugly charts, she missed a couple of deadlines and had to explain why. But she framed it to her boss as an investment: 'I'm building a new capability, and I need to let the old one go to focus.' And within six months, she was leading the analytics team's transition to Tableau. She got a promotion that the Excel-defined version of herself would never have been considered for. Luna: So the skill she retired — Excel mastery — was actually what got her noticed in the first place, but it was also what was capping her ceiling. That's the uncomfortable part. Lucas: Right. And that's the distinction I want to draw today: there's a difference between skill neglect — where a skill becomes obsolete because you're not paying attention — and planned skill obsolescence, where you consciously retire a skill to make room for a more valuable one. Neglect is passive; obsolescence is strategic. Luna: Okay, so how do you know which skills are candidates for retirement? I feel like I have a dozen things on my resume that I'm okay at, but I'm not sure which ones are holding me back. Lucas: I've been playing with a simple framework I call the 'three-question cull.' First question: Is this skill something you're still learning from? If doing it feels like a repeat of what you already know, it's probably a candidate. Second question: Is this skill directly tied to the next role you want? If not — if it's just a ticket to your current job — it might be time to let it fade. Third question: Is there a new skill that would deliver more leverage for the same amount of time? If the answer is yes, you have a clear swap. Luna: I like that. So for Priya, Excel failed all three: she wasn't learning, it wasn't leading to a promotion, and Tableau was clearly a higher-leverage skill. Lucas: Exactly. And I think the hardest part isn't the logic — it's the emotional attachment. We identify with our skills. When someone asks what you do, you often answer with a skill: 'I'm a copywriter,' 'I'm a data analyst,' 'I'm a project manager.' Retiring a skill can feel like losing part of your identity. Luna: That's real. I've seen colleagues cling to outdated technical skills — like a developer who insisted on writing everything in a language that the industry had moved away from — because it was their comfort zone. They ended up being left behind. Lucas: Yeah, and that's the other side of this coin. If you don't intentionally retire skills, the market will do it for you — and it won't be gentle. I think about the example of broadcast engineers who knew analog video switching. That skill was incredibly valuable in the 1990s. But if you didn't proactively learn digital workflows, you didn't just lose your edge — you lost your job. Luna: So the risk of not retiring is obsolescence by neglect, which is worse. But I'm also wondering — are there skills that you should never retire? Like, is there a core set that's always worth maintaining? Lucas: I think the untouchable skills are the meta ones: communication, critical thinking, learning how to learn. Those are less like skills and more like operating systems — they run everything else. But even within those, there can be obsolescence. For example, the way you communicate in a written memo versus a Slack thread versus a video update — the format changes, and the skill of adapting that communication is what matters, not the specific format. Luna: That's a good distinction. So the operating system stays, but the applications get updated. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's the mindset shift we're really talking about today: seeing your skill set as a portfolio you actively manage, not a collection you accumulate. A good portfolio manager knows when to sell an asset, even if it was once a star performer. The same goes for skills. Luna: I want to get practical here. If someone listening wants to try a skill cull this week, what's the first step? Should they literally make a list of everything they can do and rank it? Lucas: I'd start smaller. Pick one skill that you feel is taking up more mental space than it deserves — something you lean on because it's easy, not because it's valuable. Then ask yourself: if I stopped doing this tomorrow, what would break? If the answer is 'nothing important,' that's your candidate. Then commit to not using it for two weeks. See what fills the gap. That's how Priya started — she literally hid the Excel icon from her dock. Luna: That's a concrete test. I think a lot of people would be surprised by how quickly they adapt. And also surprised by how much time they free up. Lucas: Absolutely. And that time is the resource you reinvest into the new skill. Because retiring a skill isn't an end in itself — it's a means to create space for something better. Luna: You know, this conversation reminds me of something I've been thinking about with the show. We've talked a lot about building skills, stacking them, cross-training — but this is the first time we've really talked about the opposite. And I think it's just as important. Lucas: It is. And honestly, it's one of the reasons we keep doing these episodes — because we want people to have the tools to think about their careers strategically. If this podcast has helped you frame a career decision or even just given you a new way to think about your own growth, that's exactly what we're here for. Luna: Yeah. And if you've gotten value from it, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. It helps us stay ad-free and keep digging into these topics. Lucas: Exactly. No pressure — just if it's been useful. And now, back to the idea of planned obsolescence. I think there's one more layer I want to touch on, which is how to know when you've retired a skill prematurely. Luna: Oh, that's a good point. Because you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lucas: Right. So the test is: after you've stopped using the skill for, say, a month, check in with yourself. Do you miss it? Is there a task that genuinely required that skill and you had no substitute? If the answer is no to both, you're fine. But if you find yourself reaching for it repeatedly, maybe you retired the wrong one. That happened to a friend of mine who tried to give up public speaking because he thought it was taking time away from writing. But it turned out that speaking was actually a key part of his thought process — it helped him clarify ideas. So he brought it back, but in a more focused way. Luna: So it's a cycle: retire, test, and optionally reinstate. I like that. It takes the pressure off making a permanent decision. Lucas: Exactly. It's an experiment, not a funeral. And I think that's the final piece — treating skill retirement with curiosity rather than fear. Because the goal isn't to shrink your capability. It's to sharpen it. Luna: So the question for listeners is: what skill are you holding onto that's actually weighing you down? Lucas: And maybe this week, you give yourself permission to set it aside and see what grows in its place.