With regard to one's career development, I strongly agree that the ability to adapt to new environment plays a more important role than the excellent knowledge on a job and points below support my idea.
One essential reason concerns the reality that society today changes so rapidly that everyone is exposed to new things and new environment everyday. So without any doubt, we need the ability to survive from the competitively changing environment otherwise we will easily be taken places by others. For instance, my father used to be a medical machine engineer who spent most of his time on the integrating electrical circuit board but got well paid by the company. Unfortunately, in 1990, the latest technology in manufacturing those kind of broad sweep the demand of the engineer including my father. All his colleagues complained about the sudden change but do nothing because they don't know anything out of their specialized knowledge. However, when my father found out that the there weren't a company offering installing service for the new machines, which was an easy job but need labor, he saw a new opportunity and tried to do business with his former company by employing workers and trained them to do the job. After that, my father set up his own company and survived from that change. As he always says," Be a change agent, or you lose ", this story keeps on impressing me every time I remind myself and it shows that if one are not able to adapt to new environment, he would probably lose all he once had and never gain them back.
Meanwhile, the ability to hug changes give the employer the promise that one is able to do the same excellent job when he or she is settled in a unique environment which is highly recognized by the employers. Taking my personal experience as an example, I was once being selected to be a trainee in Google out of 30 top candidates and I was curious about why they chose me. When talking to the human resource manager, he highlighted that they did it because I once developed a popular game when I was working as a programmer for a company in India. What they value most in this experience is that I can adapt the Indian life style and working environment so well that I developed a high quality game as I could did in China. And they thought it's the best way to distinguish the best candidates from those clever ones. As a consequence, their words convinced me that adapting changes is the most important ability that we should develop.Admittedly, one may argue that we could be outstanding from others with superb knowledge of the job. The deeper we get through, the more competitive we are. However, according to the fact that we are facing the inevitable changing environment, if we are not capable to adapt, how are we possibly to make full use of our exceptional knowledge of our job?
In a nut shell, it has no doubt that the ability to adapt to a new environment is more important than excellent knowledge in the terms of survival and getting more opportunities in the competitively changing society.