The airline industry has been at something of a tech plateau. If she worked in computers, forget it after being out of work for 10 years. Who needs a Visual Basic 3.0, Clipper, Novell programmer ?
She's in, and it is because they wanted someone who could learn what they are NOW teaching.
Programming is different. I am a 21 year veteran of Mainframe programming and now teach Mainframe tools to other programmers. It aint going away soon, althoug a portion is off in other countries. Most of the people I know who work for large companies get trined in new tools as the need arises. Proving you can learn the things you don't already know is a more valuable asset than what you already know. That's been the secret, quite frankly, since the dawn of man.
Oh, and C and C++ aren't going away any time soon. Visual Basic, Java, etc. are transient languages.