In the spirit of continuing education I am learning a new JQuery so that I can quickly improve the functionality of web pages without too much effort. In the past I wrote my own JavaScript and will continue to do so, but its also important to know what you are good at and when you should reuse something someone else already wrote.
I'm fairly decent at writing javascript to do certain tasks and even to do a lot of Ajax. However, I never paid to much attention to flashyness or did things entirely the javascript way. I've picked up a book on JQuery and will zap through it hopefully. Expect to see some flashyness on this site as a result of my learnings. (Update, check out the portfolio page, it has some flashyness, as I said I would add)
Consultants and contractors should always continue to educate themselves and play around with new technologies. Speaking of that, everyone should continue to educate themselves, but especially in the technology field because everything changes so quickly.