To some, this is a bad point of consulting. If so, then consulting is not for you. For others, this is a great opportunity. Those people are good candidates for consulting. Each consultant must keep up to date with his or her own skills. This means that you must read magazines, attend seminars, go to conferences, read textbooks, and do whatever else it takes to stay on top of technology. There are very few engineering areas these days that aren't changing quickly. In these areas, a consultant must revise his or her skills or risk losing business. In fact, there are often new technologies that make old ones obsolete. The capable consultant will not see this as a bad thing, but rather as an opportunity to be among the first to know the new technology. Java is a great example of this. When Java came along, it created a great demand for programmers that couldn't be filled fast enough. The best consultants saw this as an opportunity to learn Java and become an expert immediately. In fact, it's easy to become an expert in a technology that no one knows, since even a little knowledge makes you more qualified than most people. Those contract programmers that learned Java commanded a very high fee and overall did very well.