"Employ rather attitude than know-how. A person with normal 'brains' will certainly learn the new work but if attitude is not correct it will not be changed by anything."
This reminded me of another slighly similar old thought I've been thinking of ... Somehow companies tend to give their trust to a person and his/her attitude only once - when they employ him/her for the first time. The reason for employment in essence is the trust that even if you come straight from school you'll be able to learn the new task and the required competences - you just basically seem to be a good person for the task. However, somehow magically this trust seems to vanish after this "reqruitement moment" - from then on you'll be wearing a label of some special set of competencies and only by that. As a result in practise, it will be very challenging to try to move radically from one area to another within that same company since somehow the trust ("This person seems to be a person whose sure to pick the needed skills... we trust him/her") that initially was the reason to recruit the person to company has disappeared and been replaced by "but hey you've not really been doing anything like this earlier, you do not have all needed competencies right now"-reality.
"Management" as your career is an exception to above mentioned. There is a strong belief that management skills are always transferrable to any level and any organisation. Well, true very often. But so are the thrive for constant learning, open mind and fun. Still, for persons pursuing manager career companies are much more willing to give significantly more challenging task than for those pursuing for constant learning& open mindness.
Maybe the reason why so many very talented "++10years in high tech as specialists" friends are getting frustrated in their previously so very interesting jobs/companies and are dreaming of doing something completely different (which is totally bizarre since we work in dream jobs within dream industry according to all reasonable meters) is that companies do not really challenge their specialist's after the first job but tend to give fairly small iterative challenge increases within the initial competence/job scope in order to minimize the risks that person would not be able to handle the new tasks. Many experienced and very talented specialists are actually kept totally under-challenged in their core competence work scope but neither can they look for specialist challenges within new competence areas since thay have already been labelled by another set of compentences. Their capability to learn, their open mindness and their thrive to master any new things are not weighted. Big companies simply have the luxury of keeping their talented specialist on risk comfort zone ?
