(1) Do the people hiring really have an actual real need?
(2) Do these people really know what skills they need or are they asking for all the skills they can think of to have confidence that the people they hire will have enough skills, no matter what the need?
(3) Given a long list of skills, there are nearly no jobs that actually need and will use all those skills. With a long list of skills in a job that uses only a few of them, soon the skills that the person still knows and are proficient with will shrink. Then what happens to the career, that is, to ability to have a chance to get hired from job ads that have a long list of skills?
(4) Don't forget that one reason for job ads with a collection of skills that is long and particular is because the people placing the ad already have a candidate for the job who claims to have those skills and someone is wondering how easy it would be to hire someone else with those skills.
(5) My experience is strongly that nearly no one in business with enough money to hire technical people actually (a) has work that they understand and that needs technical skills and (b) knows what skills are needed.
(6) Really, if they are recruiting for a long list of skills, then likely they are offering at best a version of gig work and not a real job and career.
(7) Learning a long list of skills prior to getting a job seems to mean there is something wrong with the job being applied for.
(8) My strong experience is that any very productive use of any specialized skills will totally torque off and threaten essentially everyone in the management chain all the way, literally, to the BoD.
(9) At Easter dinner this year, I learned a good lesson: There actually are employers who are ready, willing, eager, and able to hire people with just good, basic abilities and some background in some technical area for a job they have where: (a) They actually do have important work to be done and do understand the importance of that work. (b) Want their people to attack the work and learn any necessary material as they go. They don't ask the people they hire to have a long list of skills before they are hired.
(10) I'd suggest doing what have to do to get a basic income now and otherwise start a business. In that business, learn the skills the business needs. Typically for the technical skills, the list might be particular to the business but otherwise is not very long.
Lesson: In the end, in nearly all of the US economy, to have a lot of money to pay people to have good jobs there has to be a business founder who found some important problem to solve, got a good solution, and got a lot of people to pay for that solution. So, BE one of those people.
