Are You Wired and Ready?

At her last performance review, Debbie Carlson's supervisor instructed her to read Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' latest book and to subscribe to Wired. After only five years as a management consultant, the 29-year-old Carlson (not her real name) remembers feeling as if the value of her work experience was being undercut by skills belonging to more cutting edge e-business consultants.

"I recently took a weeklong course in object-oriented programming, and it's kind of a weird deal: While I need to be more e-business savvy, I'm already a manager, and I'm supervising people, and not only is it late to learn how to code Web stuff, but also I'm too overpriced to be a coder. So why am I bothering with training?" pondered Carlson, who describes the training as a mere "resume enhancer"