Re: Isn't that many "recent technologies" are crap?
My point exactly. I'm a geek by profession, and I've been having a self-perception of being pretty conservative, since my twenties maybe. I try to understand and leverage the underlying basics, rather than adopt any shiny new toy (after a few such toys, it gets old). A lot of the "new" technologies *are* crap. New things introduced for the sake of novelty / eyewash / sales pitch, rather than utility / progress / improvement. How many times can you sell an Office suite, with just a new version sticker on it? A new version of a windowing OS? A "radically novel" user inteface? Yet another software development environment? Increasingly nasty licensing schemes and vendor lock-in? Some of the new stuff feels increasingly degressive...
I have the luxury of working in a small company, where I'm free to study and try whatever I want.
I also meet IT and "embedded system integration" pro's in other companies. Speaking of training, in my experience, many of them would use training in "the underlying basics". Stuff as basic as Ethernet, TCP/IP, dynamic behavior of disk drives, disk partitioning and file systems (UNIX/Linux angle), vendor-independent basic OS and networking concepts - just to get some common sense. But maybe it's indeed down to everyone's personal eagerness to "peek under the hood", or ability to take a distance from the product you've just purchased. Or, down to chance, down to opportunity to work with different technologies...
Most of the training commercially available is heavily vendor-specific and brainwashy (Cisco, Microsoft). The other side of things is undoubtedly "freedom to starve to death", as Sir Terry would put it... Once you reach the "intermediate sorcerer" level, you can become a freelancer, pretty much on your own.
In my part of the world, there are a number of "training products" apparently developed with one key goal in mind: to get an EU grant from the "training/education funds of the EU". Hardly any IT training in there, or any other rigorous professional training. Mostly soft skills. The non-IT colleagues attend those trainings voluntarily, even happily. I have other, more entertaining or useful ways of wasting time / procrastinating - or study :-)