Be prepared for biannual career changes

The latest blog from PBS's Cringely Ozzy Knows Best rings a lot of bells for me.
Especially the following:
"This emerging world will be very different in many ways. How many of these kids
expect to someday earn a pension? Surveys show that few of them expect Social
Security to even survive until their retirement -- if they can ever retire at
all. Where we went through a couple career changes they'll go through half a
dozen or more in a life that will outlast ours by 20 years. Growing up is
changing from becoming what you will be to becoming what you will be for a while...."

I felt like I was missing something when moving from Fuji-Xerox to Amazon. It was a big career shift. And I am still in the process of getting used my new role. Every now and then, I still review papers and go to conferences to keep up with the latest trend in computer vision, a field with ever-blurring boundary. Part of computer vision has died (and I won't name those areas in order not to offend people that are still working on that part); the rest has transformed into well-defined problems in various specific industry, like Print-on-Demand, video surveillance, movie-making, etc.
As Tom used to say, "There is no use beating a dead-house". The same scenario applies to Artificial Intelligence (aka Machine Learning after Minsky declared death of AI).

I should say there was a moment of disappointment when I realize there is no way to get into the same position as those people that I grew up admiring (Turing, Hamming, Marr, King-Sun Fu), because the job descriptions have changed; be it researchers in industry labs or professors in universities, at least in US.

What are the essential things that are not changing in my next career? People skills, time management, sales pitches and persistence to success.