Writing skills, general management experience, technical and computer skills, people smarts, and international experience or language skills are examples of skills with what we call high option value -- that is, they are transferable to a wide range of possible options.

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By combining broad views of the future with technical skills, experience, and research, visioneers take speculative ideas out of the hands of sci-fi writers and technological forecasters and put them on firmer ground.

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While COBOL has not gone away at the banks, more and more of the technical staff spend their time programming new features and interfaces in modern languages and web application frameworks that provide highly applicable and transferable skills to startups only too happy to hire them for their technical training and domain experience.

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