Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint Nextel: Choose a career you're passionate about.

Daniel Debow, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Rypple:
Curiosity and intensity make you attractive to employers.

“Never waiver from your ideals; never waiver from the mission, not for one second. If you do, I think you fail. Even a for-profit corporation has their own set of ideals and their own set of mission and values, and if that drives them, that’s a great way to conduct business.”

—Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla

"Kaplan University exists not just to train students about work skills and how to get a job, although that's really important. Once you get a job as a result of a Kaplan education, you're going to be networked with all sorts of other people and a whole bunch of new opportunities, and new vistas are going to open to you as a student—as a graduate. But that's not accidental. What happens is that Kaplan’s education is likely to propel its students into an entirely new realm, and open their minds and eyes to vistas that they hadn't considered before. I mean, really, that's the goal of education."

—Jeffery Stein, President, Cosanti Foundation

“Build a platform of innovation and exploration. Don't think you have to always work for the big companies. What’s interesting is the small, emerging, innovative companies that are doing something to change a category.”

—Larry Weber, Chairman, Racepoint Group and W2 Group

“Take a lot of classes in computer science and a lot of classes involving numbers.”

—Michael Fertik, CEO, Reputation.com

“Your online life is your calling card. It is your resume. You need to manage that. That is your brand and the memory of the Internet is almost forever. So the most important thing is to manage each piece of our online persona and be thoughtful about it. Don’t post pictures that you’re going to regret. Don’t post things that you’re going to regret. That doesn’t mean don’t have a voice, that doesn’t mean don’t have a point of view, that doesn’t mean don’t speak openly—but just be really thoughtful about the mosaic that you’re creating about your online life. It should be updated weekly, monthly—it should just be a part of who you are. If you’re comfortable taking what you did Friday night, including all the pictures, and printing a thousand copies in rich color and stapling them to every telephone pole in your neighborhood, you should post it. If you wouldn’t be okay stapling it to a telephone pole, you shouldn’t post it.”

—Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla

You can be incredibly successful in American business without being a jerk. You can do it responsibly, and do it ‘right,’ and have a sense of broader purpose other than just making a name for yourself individually.”

—Alex Yoder, CEO, WebTrends

Vivek Ranadivé, Chairman and CEO, TIBCO Software:
Adapt, change, and take advantage of the opportunities of the 21st century.

Tammy Johns, SVP of Innovation and Workforce Solutions, ManpowerGroup:
Be clear about what interests and inspires you, both in school and in your career.

“The aptitude to be able to learn and the desire and strength to be able to change—I think school prepares us for that. The [specific programming] skills I learned 20 years ago in college are mostly irrelevant today for me. But it’s the aptitude and the desire to change and the structure to understand how to change—that is what school gave me.”

—Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla

“I look for three things. The first is: does this person have the joy of learning? Is he or she a lifetime learner? If you have aspiration, you look for a career. If you have even more aspiration, you look for meaning in what you do. We want people to come in very excited about what they do so at end of the day when they go home, they feel fulfilled. The second thing I’m looking for is what I call ‘capacity of doing.’ So it’s not just that you have a great idea, but do you have the capability to carry your idea through the end, so that you can create a real solution? It doesn’t mean you will not fail, but do you have the capacity and aptitude to do that? So ‘capacity of doing’ is the second thing I’m looking for. The third thing is: what is your life attitude? What do you want to do with your life? I want people to see that what they do here is part of their life, not separate. It’s not that ‘I’m coming to work for a job; my joy is when I go home.’ I want them to come in and really, really enjoy what they do. So those are the three things I’m looking for.”

—Ping Fu, President and CEO, Geomagic, Inc.

Some of the most important skills today are related to social work behaviors, and the ability to network—the ability to collaborate. Innovation is very much a collaborative kind of process, so the more individuals can be comfortable partnering with people that have maybe varying but complementary skills [the better]. Working in small teams and focusing on a disruptive kind of creative orientation to whichever phenomenon that you’re looking at in response to change probably yields the richest opportunity in terms of innovation….We should keep looking for our creative sides to guide our instincts for career and learning and collaborating with other people.”

—Don Goeman, Executive Vice President of Research, Design, and Development, Herman Miller

“[Employers are looking for people with] the ability to manage time, to show up when you say you're going to show up, and to be able to concentrate and focus on what's in front of you as well as some long-term things, [all] while balancing a whole bunch of other issues in your personal and educational life behind the scenes. These are skills that everybody wants the person working next to him or her to have. And the fact that you’re getting them by choosing, at this time in your life, to go back to school and get a Kaplan education is going to put you in a pretty good position.”

—Jeffery Stein, President, Cosanti Foundation