As the cost of finding and extracting oil and gas rises, petroleum companies must increasingly resort to proprietary and custom technology to gain or maintain a competitive edge. In contrast, the data we purchase and human resources employed are shared throughout the industry. In order for a company to differentiate itself from its peers, it must gain a competitive edge by improving the way their human resources interact, interrogate, interpret, and most importantly understand their data. This need has fueled a technology pull from vendors and a technology push within the petroleum companies. The amount of research conducted within the industry continues to grow at a strong pace, and the speed at which new technologies are becoming obsolete is also increasing. The classroom will never be able to fully train incoming students for the software and hardware they will face on even their first day in the job, much less during their first years in the industry. It will not be the students who are the fastest and most knowledgable about a software package that will be the most agile in this changing environment; it will be those students who have mastered the fundamental geological concepts, have had cross-disciplinary training, have demonstrated creativity, and have a passion for innovation who will be best prepared for the technology evolution that will continue to drive competitiveness in the oil and gas industry. In this talk, I will show examples of how quickly our technology is evolving in this landscape and show the importance of concepts over keystrokes.