Before you start reading, we’d like you to click on this link to Scientific American’s article entitled Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom. Please read it and the comments that appear immediately below it. We’ll wait for you.

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Most articles and television documentaries about unemployment and underemployment among holders of university degrees, the articles and documentaries that started appearing at the beginning of 2013, could be counted on to point fingers at governments and the educational establishment—the upper end of that establishment in particular—for failing to satisfy the needs of industry. Much of the finger pointing around that disconnect was warranted, but the fingers were pointing in the wrong direction.

Finding out what intellectual, academic and technological tools are required for the work you plan to do after graduation is your responsibility. Unless you’d rather wait for the next edition of the National Occupational Classification which will be 5 years out of date when it rolls off the presses in 2016. The 2011 edition was also 5 years out of date. The onus is also on you to keep your tools current. If your educational institution of choice can’t deliver them, you may have to shop for one that can. It’s up to you determine whether the work you want to do needs to be done. If not, your Plan A may have to give way to a Plan B that’s more in line with the needs of the market.

That’s a lot of “responsibility” in one paragraph, but those are the cards you’ve been dealt. Not to worry. That’s where Personal Due Diligence (PDD) comes in.

Universities, community colleges and trade schools are businesses. You are the customer. They’ll continue producing what they’ve always produced as long as their customers are prepared to pay for it. What their customers demand will be a function of what prospective employers will demand. Education can’t be returned for a refund, even if you do have all of the receipts. Nor can the time it took to acquire it.

What you just read is a sample of the critical thinking that isn’t being taught in enough of the traditional places. PDD will teach and help you apply it in real time as a means of identifying meaningful work in the real world. The mood of the market has changed. The cost of post-secondary education continues to rise along with student loan debt. You can’t transform a nuclear physicist into a nutritionist through re-programming, at least not yet.

PDD wants you to plan to commit the time to think through what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it so that you can build a business case that supports your Plan A, or one that says it’s time to build a more attainable Plan B. In someone else’s employ, or in your own.

Take the time now to find out about us and how we think by visiting each of the pages on our site. Click on their titles near the top of your screen, read the posts, then drop us a line or call. This is an investmentment in your hopes, your dreams and the rest of your life.