General web development question

problem solving skills would probably be the top on the list.

3 is kind of hard I'd say 1 is the key. But here's some thoughts off the top of my head.

1. Be constantly learning.
2. Use the best tool for a job. Kind of ties in to number one. If you can learn to learn you can learn new tools to get jobs done. You don't need a comprehensive knowledge of the thing even. Just enough to get the task done. For example knowing that you need a non-blocking, event-driven service may point you toward Node.js rather than Ruby on Rails.
3. Throw yourself in the deep end, all the time. Kind of ties in again to the others but if you can demonstrate time and again you can pull off miracles shows your value. That being said, don't attempt to do something too crazy!

Great replies! Thank you. I hesitate to weigh in on my own problem solving skills, but can confidently say I enjoy the problem solving process. I loved the advice to throw yourself in the deep end, I find I retain the knowledge gained that way. Thank you both.

I don't think the web design field is different than any other. When you ask people who have had a career or been successful the one thing everyone agrees on is never stop learning. That's learning in you're free time too, when your working on projects and fire fighting and working building new features you will rarely get time to look at emerging technologies or practices. Hopefully where you end up working will have a good architect and will send you on training courses but you have to put the effort in these days outside of the 9-5. Be patient and listen to those around you learn from them, even people who aren't respected can show you what not to do.

Be passionate about what you're doing, it will help with number 1 and when you have knowledge you will be more confident in your role and in turn will have more influence in how things are built and why. You're project and product managers will have technical understanding but will utilise people who know what they are talking about.

Take every opportunity, you may not want to do jobs from time to time but you never know what will come out of doing them. If you put in the effort people do notice. Not everything you will do will be exciting stuff like building new features.

Communicate effectively, I can't stress this enough. Very technical people in my experience do not communicate effectively back to the business. Often this is used to obfuscate, they sound very clever but alienate themselves outside of that niche and eventually these people are exposed.