Critical skills for getting the most from your career:
Networking—as a general skill, my absolute number 1
Communications—Both written and verbal skills are a must; visual design if you do a lot of visual presentations
Grammar—maybe not too much; your boss probably thinks it’s okay to use a comma in front of a subordinating conjunction too
Organizational strategies—I’m not sure if this can be taught. It may be purely a personality trait.
information technology—I doubt this is a problem for most of you; note I do not at all mean computer science which has a much lower value
how to not be a dick
How to evaluate ideas scientifically—Determinism, Parsimony, Probability Estimation, the Scientific Method, Research Methods and their relative validity
Advanced Statistics—this is critical if you’re going into academia; the rest of us only really need it to look good on a grad school application and to get by for those couple of years; most advanced mathematics simply never come up in the real world
finance—some important ones are index fund, expense ratio, and IRA
tailoring—this is critical if you’re going into law, finance, or politics; not how to tailor but how to evaluate a piece of clothing’s quality and to get the right fit; it is also useful for other fields but less so (no, khakis are not typically business appropriate)
Where to look for the best information in your field
as many hundreds of hours of practice as possible in your chosen craft—if your field is performance-driven then this should be done even if it is to the detriment of the other skills I named; if your field is signalling-driven then this should come after the rest of this list
This leaves out all the critical life skills of course.
Critical skills for getting the most from your career:
Networking—as a general skill, my absolute number 1
Communications—Both written and verbal skills are a must; visual design if you do a lot of visual presentations
Grammar—maybe not too much; your boss probably thinks it’s okay to use a comma in front of a subordinating conjunction too
Organizational strategies—I’m not sure if this can be taught. It may be purely a personality trait.
information technology—I doubt this is a problem for most of you; note I do not at all mean computer science which has a much lower value
how to not be a dick
How to evaluate ideas scientifically—Determinism, Parsimony, Probability Estimation, the Scientific Method, Research Methods and their relative validity
Advanced Statistics—this is critical if you’re going into academia; the rest of us only really need it to look good on a grad school application and to get by for those couple of years; most advanced mathematics simply never come up in the real world
finance—some important ones are index fund, expense ratio, and IRA
tailoring—this is critical if you’re going into law, finance, or politics; not how to tailor but how to evaluate a piece of clothing’s quality and to get the right fit; it is also useful for other fields but less so (no, khakis are not typically business appropriate)
Where to look for the best information in your field
as many hundreds of hours of practice as possible in your chosen craft—if your field is performance-driven then this should be done even if it is to the detriment of the other skills I named; if your field is signalling-driven then this should come after the rest of this list
This leaves out all the critical life skills of course.