I set aside about two months every year to pick up new technology.

I'm 26, have no mouths to feed, and no debt. Losing two months of income in return for better work prospects is not a big deal to me.

I start by building a small project using whatever bit of technology I'm learning, put it up on GitHub, write a blog post or two about it, and do a show and tell at a local tech meetup or conference. This results in a bunch of leads that I can then choose from.

My process works fine for skills that don't take much time to learn, or are in the same lane as what I already do. E.g, going from Angular to React or Python+Django to Node+Express.

However, if I were to move to a completely different field I might have to take a different approach. I haven't done it so I have no experiences to share. I imagine I'd have to take out a bigger chunk of time, perhaps ask somebody from my desired field to mentor me.