Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / How Skill Forgetting Makes You a Better Hire
Transcript
- Lucas: There is this assumption that more skills always make you more valuable. That if you keep accumulating certifications, courses, and competencies, your career trajectory just keeps climbing. Luna: Right. And the market kind of reinforces it. You see job postings listing ten things and think, I need to know all of those. Lucas: Exactly. But a 2025 study from MIT Sloan looked at knowledge decay rates across industries, and one of their findings was that professionals who actively prune outdated skills are perceived as more competent by hiring managers. They don't just learn faster—they forget strategically. Luna: So you're saying forgetting can be a deliberate career move? Lucas: I am. And I want to talk about a specific example. A senior product manager at Spotify, let's call her Maya, had been in the role for about five years. She had skills like Flash animation, early Salesforce admin, and a certification in a legacy analytics tool that Spotify had sunset. She was carrying these on her resume because she thought they showed range. Luna: But they were probably doing the opposite. They diluted her focus. Lucas: Exactly. A recruiter looks at that and thinks, why is this person listing things that haven't been relevant in years? It signals you haven't updated your thinking. Maya cleared her resume of five legacy skills, restructured her narrative around three core modern competencies: product strategy, data-informed decision-making, and cross-functional leadership. Within four months, she landed a director role at a fintech company. Luna: That's a pretty dramatic shift. But I wonder—does forgetting mean you literally unlearn something, or just stop emphasizing it? Lucas: Great question. The study distinguishes between unlearning—actively discarding mental models—and deprioritizing. For most of us, it's deprioritizing. You don't forget how to use Excel overnight. But you stop leading with it. You let it become background knowledge. Luna: So it's about narrative control. You decide what the market sees first. Lucas: Exactly. And the market rewards focus. I've seen data from a couple of recruiting platforms suggesting that resumes with 7 to 10 targeted skills get 30 percent more callbacks than resumes with 15 plus. More isn't better. It's noise. Luna: But there's a fear, right? That if I let go of something, I'll need it later. Like a sunk cost mindset applied to skills. Lucas: That's exactly the trap. And it's emotional. You spent 200 hours learning something, so you want to keep it visible. But the opportunity cost is that you're not signaling growth. The MIT study called this 'skill hoarding' and found it's especially common among mid-career professionals. Luna: I've definitely been guilty of that. I still have a line on my LinkedIn about a content management system I haven't touched in four years. Lucas: And that might be costing you. Let me give you a framework. Think of your skill stack as a garden. You have to prune. The question is: what is the half-life of the skill? Technical skills in software have a half-life of about two to three years. Soft skills like negotiation or stakeholder management have a longer half-life, maybe five to seven years. So you prune technical skills more aggressively. Luna: So you're saying I should keep the soft skills, but drop the technical ones that are stale. Lucas: Generally, yes. But there's nuance. If a technical skill is foundational—like SQL in data roles—you keep it even if it's old, because it's still used. But if it's a niche framework that very few companies use, it's a liability. Luna: How do you audit your own skill stack without being biased? Lucas: The study suggests a three-step process. One: list every skill on your resume or LinkedIn. Two: for each, ask yourself: have I used this in the last 12 months? If not, is it still a dependency for any current role? Three: if it's not a dependency, ask: does listing it help me tell a coherent story about where I'm going? If the answer is no, delete it. Luna: And Maya did exactly that. She dropped Flash, legacy Salesforce, that old analytics tool, plus two others. Lucas: Right. And what happened is her resume became a clearer signal. Recruiters could immediately see: product strategy, data, leadership. That's a director-level narrative. Before, it was a jumble. Luna: There's also a psychological benefit. Letting go of old skills can make you feel lighter, more focused on the future. Lucas: Absolutely. And that's part of what the study measured. They surveyed hiring managers and found that candidates who demonstrated 'cognitive flexibility'—the ability to update their own knowledge map—were rated higher on leadership potential. Luna: So forgetting isn't just about pruning. It's about signaling that you're adaptable. Lucas: Exactly. And that's a huge competitive advantage. Because most people are clinging to the past. Luna: I want to push back a little though. What about the jack-of-all-trades argument? Some roles explicitly require breadth, like a startup founder or a consultant. Lucas: Fair point. Breadth matters in certain contexts. But even then, you need a core narrative. A founder might list fundraising, product, marketing, hiring—but those are all high-level. They wouldn't list Ruby on Rails and Photoshop. They'd list the strategic skills. Luna: So the principle holds. Lead with depth, prune the irrelevant breadth. Lucas: Exactly. And here's a concrete test: show your resume to someone outside your field. If they can't quickly tell what you do and what you're good at, you have too many skills. Luna: That's a good litmus test. I'm going to do that this week. Lucas: And this is something we talk about a lot on this show—thinking strategically about your career, not just accumulating credentials. If these conversations have helped you make a decision or reframe your approach, that's exactly why we do this. Luna: Yeah, it's one of those things where a small mindset shift can have real impact. Lucas: And 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 focused on the content. Luna: Exactly. And we appreciate every bit of support. Okay, back to skill forgetting. One thing I found interesting in the MIT study was the concept of 'relearning cost.' Lucas: Oh, good point. They found that even when you let go of a skill, if you need it later, you can relearn it much faster than learning it the first time. The neural pathways don't fully disappear. So the risk of pruning is lower than people think. Luna: So it's not a permanent goodbye. It's more like putting something in storage. Lucas: Exactly. And that storage takes up mental space. Better to clear it out and focus on what's in front of you. Luna: I want to ask about timing. Is there a right moment to do a skill audit? Lucas: Quarterly is what I'd recommend. Tie it to your performance review cycle or a personal check-in. But at minimum, before you apply for a new job. You don't want to be pruning under pressure. Luna: And don't just prune the resume. Actually think about what you're spending time learning. Because the opportunity cost applies to learning too. Lucas: That's a great extension. If you're spending weekends learning a skill that's already fading in relevance, you're wasting time you could spend deepening a high-value skill. The study found that professionals who deliberately forgot low-value skills and reinvested that time into high-value skills saw a 40 percent faster promotion rate. Luna: Forty percent. That's huge. It's almost like forgetting is the hidden accelerator. Lucas: It is. And I think it's counterintuitive enough that most people won't do it. Which means those who do have a real edge. Luna: So to wrap up, the takeaway: do a skill prune this week. Be ruthless. Ask yourself if each skill is helping you tell the story you want to tell. Lucas: And if you're nervous, remember: you can always relearn. But the clarity you gain is worth more than the comfort of holding on.