Critical Thinking Strategies to Impress Employers with Jeff Kavanaugh

The Voice of Job Seekers

Graduates undervalue communication and critical thinking. Employers want more of it. My guest today, Jeff Kavanaugh, explains how graduates can prepare for the job market. Jeff addresses much of this in his new book, Consultant 2.0. If you want to know more about his book you can go to his website.

How are you preparing for the job market?

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About Jeff Kavanaugh:

Senior Partner at Infosys, a $10bn global IT consulting firm. He is also an adjunct professor at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has been featured on Fast Company, Huffington Post, and Tech Crunch.

Here are some highlights from our discussion:

• People with little experience should seek relevant internships
• It is a credible data point and learn to apply real world examples and stories
• Critical thinking demystified requires you to restructure your thinking– calls for rigorous application and logic
• During interviews, state your conclusion first and support with 3-5 sub points
• We discussed how imperative it is to use inductive logic to communicate your thinking
• Knowing your audience, research, understand their experience, dig deeper
• Show respect in researching the company and interviewer
• Phrases, stories, adjectives are clues to the interviewer your willingness to connect and relate
• We discussed studies showing employers value work ethic, professionalism, competency
• Absorb the publications you read outside of college work. Read publications such as Wall Street and the Economists
• After reading, write a 500-word blog post on what you’ve written over 2 or 3 years. Collecting 20 or 30 articles over time may catch the attention of prospective employers
• Employers look for how a job candidate will frame their stories and answers. The right answer is secondary to how it’s analyzed and broken down by logic

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