I was listening to a few DBAs talking recently and they were talking about being stuck in a rut at work. Quite a few of the people worked in environments that were stable, and they were charged with keeping things that way. These people were competent at their jobs and were comfortable with their responsibilities.

But they were a bit bored.

They were comfortable coming to work, handling the regular tasks that ensured systems continued to operate as expected, and solving the issues that cropped up. They restored databases for development refreshes or the occasional hardware failure. They added indexes when complaints were filed about queries and loaded spreadsheets with exported data when asked. Without a lot of pressure, they worked through each day, relying on, and using, the skills they've built up over time. New people could be trained how to handle everything in six months and they'd rely on that six months of skills for years.

It's comfortable when things are familiar. Why learn Biml or build an SSIS package when you can use the Import wizard to load a spreadsheet? Why mess with log shipping if you can restore a full backup in 15 minutes? Why work harder than you are required to do for any task?

I get it. It's comfortable to use your skills over and over, and solidify them. I'd just ask you to think about how valuable that six months of skill will be if you needed to look for a new job next month? Will your six months of skills, repeated for 5 years, help you stand out as an interview candidate? They might, depending on how broad the range of those skills are, but are you comfortable with replication? Can you talk about different DR and HA technologies (and understand the difference)? Can you write running totals and find gaps in data stream or is your six months of training limited to simple aggregates? Do you really know how to tune a query that's running slow?

Some of our jobs are stressful and busy, and it's hard to find time to learn anything new. However I've almost never found that I couldn't pick up a new skill every six months or so while working at my job. Taking a few extra minutes to solve a task in a new one, once in awhile, and building up another skill can be good insurance for you career. It also might let you find a more efficient way to manage the same old task you've been getting done the same way for years.