The National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE) conducted a survey of more than 3 000 school leavers and discovered that 80 per cent of them admitted they were not ready for the world of work. NISE also realised that many of the new workers in the job market lacked most of the critical skills and the ethos which employers wanted.Thus, NISE has prepared a detailed book, Off to A Good Start – Your Guide to the World of Work, with the goal of making that book a critical piece of literature for all secondary institutions in the island. Those objectives were outlined by NISE chief executive officer Kim Tudor as she addressed Rotarians last week at Hilton Barbados.Tudor explained that NISE originally targeted people already in the job market in order to bring about service excellence in Barbados. “But now we are working backwards to develop that service excellence in persons who will be entering the job market,” Tudor pointed out. (KB)