WANTED

Eight Critical Skills You Need To Succeed

Non-Fiction - Business/Finance
Kindle Edition
Reviewed on 04/25/2015
Buy on Amazon

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Author Biography

Charles Cranston Jett is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the Harvard Graduate School of Business.
He served in the United States Naval Nuclear Submarine Force where he created the nuclear attack submarine (SSN) predeployment training program for covert submarine operations, the tactical doctrine for the nuclear submarine electronic surveillance system (AN/WLR-6), and is the creator of the geographic plot (Geo Plot) for covert tracking of Soviet submarines from the SSN platform.
He has had 15 years experience in the management consulting and executive recruiting world where he participated in strategic planning, marketing, and organizational development engagements, and CEO and Board of Directors searches.
He has worked with corporate organizations in the area of critical skills identification and skill profiling to assist them in their corporate development programs as well as enabling them to target specific skill profiles for recruitment for entry level management positions.
He created the career management tool known as the "Doom Loop" which has become popularized as a highly useful tool for anticipating and addressing various "career crises" as well as enabling organizations and executive search professionals to assess the skill capabilities, potentials, and current situations of individuals in corporate environments.
He is the author of several publications including the magazine articles "Whatever Happened to Corporate Loyalty?" and "Critical Skills and the CEO" - both of which were published by Chief Executive Magazine and have become widely popular articles in the reprint world. He is also the author of two new books: "Wanted: Critical Skills!!" and "Career Crises and the Doom Loop."
He is an accomplished speaker on the subject of Critical Skills having been featured by many of the nation's top business schools (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Northwestern, Chicago, Michigan, etc.) and the American Psychological Association. He focused on skill development at the high school level and was featured in the US Department of Labor's publication, "Teaching the SCANS Competencies" which was distributed nationwide. To facilitate high schools' and training organizations' ability to create and manage work-based learning programs to teach critical skills and the SCANS competencies, he created the software management tool known as "Coop2000®" and served as a national school-to-work technical assistance provider as well as a national workforce investment act technical assistance provider.
He is the author of WANTED: Eight Critical Skills You Need To Succeed, The Doom Loop, and Field Studies - all published by OutskirtsPress.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Nandita Keshavan for Readers' Favorite

Wanted: Eight Critical Skills You Need To Succeed is a compelling book which describes eight critical skills which the author argues should be universally grasped in preparing for a successful career. In this book, Charles Jett explains his journey from the corporate world to the high school world, where his aim became to promote good understanding and experience of critical skills needed in the work place.

Jett identified these skills after having done extensive research of job specifications to determine the top 8 skills needed in the world of work. After this, it became clear to him that the standardised testing approach to education was by no means adequate in preparing young people for their careers, since they were not encouraged to develop critical skills. Jett makes a strong case throughout the book for the need to promote these skills, arguing that they should be gained by experience.

Jett cites many examples in which the skills can be encouraged, such as via job shadowing, mentoring programs, internships, service based learning, apprenticeships and problem based learning. Ultimately he suggests that there need not be a single universal method or program to mediate this change, but that individual schools should create their own opportunities for students to acquire these skills.

I wholeheartedly agree with the fear of what Jett describes as the rising tide of mediocrity in education, and think that true education is not complete without first hand experience of the skills needed to succeed in a career. The job market is competitive and changes frequently, so schools and students should aim to encourage talent, not only in the aptitude for content based learning, but also regarding communication, production, information, analysis, interpersonal, technology, time management and continuous education.