What your college may not teach you!

In my last 16+ years of industry career I had the privilege of working with many college graduates as a guide for their projects and there has been a lot of learning from each of these. The graduates include from National institute of technology, Indian institute of technology and recently one from UIUC, IL, USA. My experience has been amazing and I thought I should put down few points of my learning as a guidance to succeed in industry for young graduates who just started working. Below are 9 points not in any particular order but starting with very important one.

1. Accountability: I can't explain how important is this. Your credibility quickly build or break based on this one single factor. Can you do what you say and say what you do. It's not always possible to achieve everything that you wanted to achieve, but can you inform the status at some frequency and avoid surprises?
2. Independent thinking: This is a major problem with the education system and some extent to Indian culture. We need some one else to tell us what to do, how to do and what we should expect. The engineers think most of the time that there is some thing else to this than applying common sense. It is allowed to think new and arrive at the solutions of your own way rather than the text book way.
3. Documentation skills: Many of us still working on this skill. How to do you translate a discussion in a meeting to MOM notes and clear concise action items. Writing emails that communicates right, making project reports that make sense is almost mandatory for any fresh graduate joining the industry.
4. Courage to stand up: If you don't stand up for some thing, you fall for everything. Courage to ask appropriate questions, provide your view point clearly, adding value in a group discussion with your thought process is some thing that organization expects. You don't need to wait for some one else ask you to act. Asking a good knowledgeable question in a business leader all hands is a remarkable thing for any new comer. Just because you are a starter you are not inferior to any one. Every one in the company are paid by employer and roles and responsibilities are defined for each one. Instead of feeling shy in working with others you should take pride performing your duties well.
5. Quick learning: Clearly knowing what to learn first, prioritize the time, spending additional 1-2 hrs after the office to learn is almost mandatory for all new engineers. How quickly you learn at your early career will have a huge impact in your long term career growth.
6. Don't need to know everything: Again you need to know things and quickly learn, at the same time it's impossible to know everything that you deal with. If you listen from some one a new definition use the word as it is. If you Plan your learning items and keep on learning each day, one day will come very soon where you will match to the knowledge of some one with many years of experience.
7. Prioritization: Need to do things based on the priority as you can't do all activities at the same time. Don't hung up on the things because you started them first. Executing things at their best time yield best results. Need to have a visibility of bigger picture and sequence the activities accordingly with a focused approach to get the best results.
8. Asking right questions: Many of us don't ask questions or ask too many questions. Asking right questions is an art. Based on a targeted outcome and a logical sequence asking questions will get you best knowledge and your mentor appreciate your curiosity and challenging attitude.
9. Last but not the least, Programming skills: you should be a programming geek what ever the department that you work in the organization. These days writing macros in Excel, develop some automation codes for day to day activities becoming a norm in all companies and this skill alone may put you in a fast track career path.

Hope the above points summarize what it takes to get start on a strong foundation. Any one have any other thoughts, it will be great to know.