Way back in the day I worked for Hewlett-Packard when Bill and Dave still ran the company. We had an excess of hardware engineers. Instead of laying them off, HP retrained them to be coders. Started something I think they called "Unixversity"
Things don't work like that anymore. If you do your job and your skills get out of date then you are disposed of. Not sure which is the best approach. On the one hand it allows a company to be nimble and forces people to constantly update their skills. On the other hand, a person is less likely to devote themselves entirely to a company if they know they are a disposable commodity. It is also hard to do your job as well if you are always looking over your back and spending as much time as possible working on skills that are not relevant to your current job.