Whatever kind of role you are in whether permanent or contract, I have come to realise that it is good to what I call 'do an audit'. What I mean is for example is to take note of the various skills/strengths of the team or department you work in, and see where you can fill any skill gaps. Let me illustrate further. Let's say you join a team of 20 programmers at Company X who all have varying skills and experience. Across the board you notice that most of the major programming languages are covered - C++, VB Script, Powershell and Java etc. However, you may notice that there seems to be a 'gap' when it comes to couple of the older technologies such as Pascal and Foxpro. These programs may not be 'popular', but still needed to maintain and support some legacy applications that Company X uses. My point is, that in a situation I just described you could help the skill gap by learning or sharpening up on your Pascal / Foxpro skills. By doing this, you would be increasing your value to your team and in turn company X. On one of my contracts, I was on a team of lads working on a large infrastructure project. After a little while I noticed that some guys were great at VMWare, Active Directory, Citrix and SQL. However for one reason or another they didn't have a strong Exchange person. Though Exchange wasn't my favourite product by any means, I took the opportunity to brush up on it. Over time I was able to assume more and more responsibility for this aspect of the project, and I ended up enjoying it quite alot. Whether you are a contractor or a permie, being aware and proactive in this manner can only be good for you. It is always good to try and specialise in what skills you enjoy using or are the best at. It isn't good just to do what the mainstream are doing, but it is always advantageous to have some niche skills up your sleeve. This will always help you in your career, because firms will always pay more for those skills that are hardest to find.

Throughout my career I have noticed how people have learned a particular technology/task become very valuable as a result. A good friend of mine comes to mind. When I was in the NHS, I was part of a small team supporting a hospital's network. There were about 4 of us..doing mainly 2nd/3rd line support  on Windows 95/98 and NT4. Eventually we took on a young lad fresh out of college. He was eager to learn, but didn't have much IT experience. However as the months passed on, this guy just had a love of anything related networking and cabling. He really applied himself and started to learn about the different Cisco switches and routers - how to configure and install them. Within a year or two, this guy established himself as our network 'expert'. He became very valuable to our team because he had carved out a niche for himself. At times we were heavily dependent on him. He did very well. In fact we still keep in touch. He is now working as a technical author for a large networking company in Taiwan. I use these examples to encourage you to develop what I call 'depth of skill'. Learn to master a few things instead of having just average knowledge in many things. It is better to be an expert at something rather than a jack of all trades!