Professional stagnation is the inability of people trained in one field of knowledge or activity to make use of their talents in a manner which gives them satisfaction in another field. It is a limitation in people's ability to cope with changing situations.
Either the original training in tertiary education needs to be modified, or refresher courses need to be introduced to those who graduated 5, 10 or 15 years before. The education of the non-graduate population also needs modification or the problem of stagnation becomes a societal problem as developments in micro-electronics leave less and less scope for the time-consuming and labour intensive occupations that provide jobs for the major proportion of the adult population and which have, with more or less satisfaction, kept them occupied during more than half their waking hours.