Good morning.
I am still using Adobe CS3 products. Since I purchased these under an educational purchase I can’t upgrade the software. I can’t really afford buying the Adobe CS5 suite. I am between jobs. I am sure everyone is looking for CS5 users. Or are they? I guess my question is am I doomed?
I don’t see why you would be doomed. If you can churn out an amazing design, who cares if it was done in Photoshop CS5 or MS Paint? Good design is good design.
I got CS5 a few months ago. You are not doomed at all, lol. In the past I used Adobe Photoshop 7 and was fine. The new features are not a big deal to me and I rarely use them. I mostly use it for: Layers, Pixel Editing, Gradients, and a few other things.
If Puppet Warp, Content Aware Scale/Fill, and a few 3D things are that important to you i guess you could get it, but i wouldnt if you have cs3.
Personally I would be happy with CS3 
With my limited design capabilities I only really use the basics of the program which is more than adequate.
CS3 is just fine. It’s a production tool, the product matters, not a version of some tool.
The main issue I find with not upgrading is that other companies I work with tend to upgrade quite rapidly and send through files in the latest CS4/5 versions.
If you have the skills in cs3 then any incremental new features in later versions would be easily and quickly learned if necessary in a new position. Most of the newer features in photoshop cs5 are ‘nice to have’ but are not daily essentials.