""Looking back; Looking forward"", has been structured into 24 chapters encompassing a variety of critical skills and competencies. Each skill and competency has a brief description with examples, learnings and an especially exercise for your own learning. You can and must think of more relevant what-if situations to come up with responses. From my experience, I have selected skills and competencies, which I feel are very important for practicing managers and first-time managers, to be successful in their careers. I have used my own experience to help the reader understand the importance of these skills and competencies. Each example has a learning associated with it.