The Critical 14 Years of Your Professional Life

In today's ultra-competitive, lean-and-mean workplace, your professional success won't be determined by your family background, college affiliation, or educational major. Your intelligence, talent, drive, and ambition ... don't matter, either. As no-nonsense Manhattan executive and international business consultant Robert L. Dilenschneider shows you in this enlightening, invaluable book, your success will depend on one thing only: learning the ropes of the working world - and figuring out how to be happy within it - during the first fourteen years of your professional life. Why fourteen years? Because once you approach your mid-to-late thirties, you won't be easily forgiven for business mistakes - for power struggles with the boss or cluelessness about marketing yourself, for mishandling office politics, or for the negative attitude that comes from feeling "stuck" in an ill-fitting career. If you don't fit in, you're liable to be considered "work illiterate," and your opportunities will be limited accordingly. It's imperative to know the ways of the work world, but with today's volatile economy and downsized companies, older generations are often too busy - or too threatened - to guide you. Now, in The Critical 14 Years of Your Professional Life, Dilenschneider offers himself as that necessary mentor. He guides you on using your own Critical 14 Years to put yourself on the path to unlimited opportunity - within your current job, into the next one, or in your own business. He explains why you are ideally positioned for success in the twenty-first century and why success and happiness don't have to be mutually exclusive.