Well my latest bit of personal development in the IT world is multithreaded development using scripting languages (as I don’t like waiting for stuff to compile).
Using multithreading as far as UI testing can goes means you can cover a lot in less time.
Where I’m looking at is Python (due to it’s integration with Quality Center) as well as Ruby (because I like the syntax and it offers a language which interacts with the JVM).
An area of interest is probably Jython. If I can get that integrated with a Quality Center VAPI-XP test, then I almost got the best of both worlds.