Career or Job? (Score 1)

My opinion formed from fourteen plus years of IT consulting is this: You learn software engineering skills for your career, and software technologies for a specific job.

You are right; the list of available technologies is daunting. Worse yet, the list are continually changing. If you concentrate on a specific technology, when that technology falls out of favor what skills can you carry forward? Also consider your career ten years from now. Assume the current rage is a technology which has only been available for 1-2 years. Ask yourself why an employer should hire you at a higher rate than a recent grad with the same amount of experience in the specific technology.

Some examples of engineering skills to start with are object oriented design, design patterns, data structures, design methodologies. There are some other good suggestions in other replies here.

You can choose areas of interest in which to specialize, but the specific technologies you are going to use in professional life are going to be determined by a variety of factors including best fit, employer constraints, technologies favored by your co-workers or senior developer/designers etc.

Finally, if I am looking for people to add to my team, I'm going to choose someone with good engineering skills and programming habits over someone who may have more experience with a technology but poor engineering skills. IMHO engineering skills are fundamental and technologies are incidental to an IT professional.