We assume that you’re pursuing a college degree because you’d like to get a good job or a better job than the ones you’ve had. Wouldn’t you love to increase your odds of getting that job upon graduation and then succeeding at that job, crafting a long and flourishing career path? We want that for you, too! Studying management can help you develop and improve your employability skills. Entry-level employees and working professionals can benefit from having solid foundations in skills such as critical thinking, communication, problem solving, collaboration, and so forth. Throughout this text, you’ll learn and practice many employability skills that hiring managers identify as important to success in a variety of business settings, including small and large firms, nonprofit organizations, and public service. Such skills will also be useful if you plan to start your own business. These skills include:

• Critical thinking involves purposeful and goal-directed thinking used to define and solve problems and to make decisions or form judgments related to a particular situation or set of circumstances. It involves cognitive, metacognitive, and dispositional components that may be applied differently in specific contexts. Thinking critically typically involves elaborating on information or an idea; describing important details and prioritizing them based on significance; identifying details that reveal bias; embellishing an idea, description, or an answer/response; making conclusions based on evidence that explain a collection of facts, data, or ideas; summarizing information in a concise and succinct manner; determining the order of events and defining cause and effect relationships; identifying influencing factors that cause events to occur; and so forth.

• Communication is defined as effective use of oral, written, and nonverbal communication skills for multiple purposes (e.g., to inform, instruct, motivate, persuade, and share ideas); effective listening; using technology to communicate; and being able to evaluate the effectiveness of communication efforts—all within diverse contexts.

• Collaboration is a skill in which individuals can actively work together on a task, constructing meaning and knowledge as a group through dialogue and negotiation that results in a final product reflective of their joint, interdependent actions.

• Knowledge application and analysis is defined as the ability to learn a concept and then apply that knowledge appropriately in another setting to achieve a higher level of understanding.

• Social responsibility includes skills related to both business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Business ethics includes sets of guiding principles that influence the way individuals and organizations behave within the society that they operate. Being ethical at your job involves the ability to identify potential ethical dilemma(s); the affected stakeholders; the important personal, organizational, and external factors; possible alternatives; and the ability to make an appropriate decision based on these things. Corporate social responsibility is a form of ethical behavior that requires that organizational decision makers understand, identify, and eliminate unethical economic, environmental, and social behaviors.

Each chapter is loaded with opportunities for you to use and work on the skills you’ll need to be successful in the twenty-first century workplace. Skills that will help you get a job and pursue a fulfilling career path, wherever that might take you! The following Employability Skills Matrix links these five employability skills with special features found in each chapter. Our unique features include (1) three distinctive boxes—Classic Concepts in Today’s Workplace (historical management concepts and how they’re used today), Being Ethical: A 21st-Century Skill (a real-life, contemporary ethics dilemma), and Managing Technology in Today’s Workplace (ways technology is changing the workplace); (2) MyLab assignments, particularly Write It, Watch It, and Try It; (3) Management Skill Builder, which highlights a specific management skill and provides an opportunity to “do” that skill; (4) Experiential Exercise, which is another learning-by-doing, hands-on assignment where you “do” something, usually within a group; and (5) Case Applications, real-life stories of people and organizations. Within these features, you’ll have the opportunity to think critically and apply your knowledge as you consider special cases and concepts. You’ll also have the opportunity to improve your collaboration and communication skills by learning what you might do or say in the described situations to adapt to the work world positively and effectively. And you’ll be confronted with ethical dilemmas in which you’ll consider the ethics of particular behaviors in the workplace. All five of these skills are critical to success whether you pursue a career in management or some other field since, as the previous section pointed out, the workplace and workforce are changing and will continue to change. These skills will help you successfully navigate those changes.