Of course, as your skills go up, the chance that you'll get credit for them increases. Truly world class skills would market themselves. The point, however, is that there _is_ an independence between your skills and employers perception of them. It's not always going to be obvious to an employer that you can provide them with value.
It's not enough to simply have skills. It's necessary to demonstrate them, to get them out there. The techniques the presenter outlines might be familiar to someone who has done some reading on the general subject, but to the sort of entitled mindset that the presentation seems to be directed at, they mightn't be so obvious. Blogging, building a portfolio, networking: basic stuff to some, but not to everyone.
The tone of his writing and constant links to others with own-name domains now makes more sense... as do their Squidoo pages.
2) Be passionate
3) Get your name out there(blogs)
I tried reading it, then skimmed after page 10, then really skimmed/skipped after page 15. I'm not the target audience and maybe I've heard/read it all too many times to care to read it again in 30 slides.
I really didn't care to read quote from misc bloggers with their self-named domains. Seems like the part of the post was to get his name and other bloggers names out there.
I would have preferred to find out what the author did to get himself jobs with authors, VCs, directors, etc. He never goes into details about that. I don't care about quotes and general ideas. I want the real details about exactly what he did. Maybe I skimmed/skipped too much?
1) Have skills
Newsflash: What we call a "job" is simply the trading of one currency (actual monetary currency) for another currency (useful work). If the work you are doing does not have some element of skill then you will not get a job. If your degree supplies some of those limited in-demand skills then you may not need more than your degree. If your degree does not then you will need to acquire useful skills in another manner. Period.