I am bit old school in taking initiative and learning new technologies, software etc that comes and goes fast in the market. This is in regard to new server class operating systems, configuring switches and routers etc.
I think in this regard manual software testing scores as there is no need for the above, but just learn business process and check and see whether it works. In case there is some thing that doesnt work, just flag it to the software engineers who would rectify the issue.
This is what i think. Please correct me if I am wrong.