Crafting a Successful Career

Crafting a Successful Career is the career direction you've been looking for. You are about to enter the workforce and you think you are ready. Now what? Using a step-by-step approach, author R.A.Kuffel identifies early career obstacles and coaches you through eight strategies guaranteed to accentuate your talents and create a platform for career growth that is unique to you. The author begins with a challenge for you to create your own definition of success--the only definition that matters--then suggests you get a job (go after a big job first), find a mentor, become the best technical person you can be, create your network, understand sponsorship and learn to influence it, perform well, generate a backup plan, develop character qualities and attitudes, beware of potential pitfalls, and manage factors you cannot control. If you are twenty-five and entering the workplace for the first time, forty-five and turning your career around, or sixty-five and wondering what happened, this book is for you

"Crafting a Successful Career -- Eight Principles for Winning in a Challenging World" delivers the guide for starting your career that you have been looking for whether you a first time careerist or a veteran entering a new phase of your career. In thirteen compact chapters, author R.A.Kuffel lays out strategies sure to challenge stumbling blocks common to every career. Read this and you will have your plan for how you will build your future. This book is not about becoming the CEO--most of us don't even aspire to that job or even the wealth, position, or the honors that go along with it. This book is about being successful; on our terms. It is about what success means for the rest of us, the 99 percent who want to maximize our careers within boundaries we created, but who harbor no dreams of leading the band and aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary to win the corporate sweepstakes. Using the author's step-by-step approach, you will discover a strategy to craft a successful career, maximize your success, and win in a way that is meaningful for you. The author begins with a challenge for you to create your own definition of success--the only definition that matters. He follows the approaches to jump-start each phase of your journey: Get A Job, Find A Mentor, Become Your Best, Create Your Network, Understand Sponsorship, Perform Well, and Generate A Backup Plan. Finally, he speaks to the 0.1 percent who will settle for nothing less than becoming the CEO, who face long odds in a competitive situation where the probability of reaching their goal isn't good, but it is possible -- somewhere -- and they want the challenge. If you are twenty-five and entering the work force for the first time, forty-five and turning your career around, or sixty-five and wondering what happened, this book is for you.

In September 2001, R. A. Kuffel completed a successful thirty-five-year career developing food products for a Fortune-500 food company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to joining the company in January 1967, the author obtained a bachelors degree in chemistry from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and a master’s degree in organic chemistry from the University of North Dakota. Following two years of military service in the U. S. Army Chemical Corps, he was honorably discharged at the rank of captain and returned to his home state to join General Mills, Inc., where he spent his entire working career. In 2007, he published his novel, The Dangled Illusion, a fictional memoir showing that you don’t have to be the CEO to be successful. With Crafting a Successful Career: 8 Principles for Winning in a Challenging World, he completes his statement about business and describes how every employee, regardless of title, can have a successful career. He’s now writing a family memoir, drawing largely from a stack of notes compiled by his late father. The author lives in Plymouth, Minnesota, with his wife of forty-five years, Jo. The couple has two children and four grandchildren.