What "real-world" or transferable skills can be gained from being able to do literary analysis/criticism?

A literature degree teaches you to think about how words relate to power, intention and identity. Everything you do you do through words. A highly developed sense of how they work, what effects they produce, how they can be used to radical and conservative ends, and how they can help us think beyond a given moment and its possibilities is invaluable it seems to me. On a practical level, undergraduates who study literature are obliged to develop a good working knowledge of history, psychology, sociology and a number of other disciplines. I taught literature in universities for many years, and still do. I'm always impressed by the fact that studying literature can transform a person's critical abilities and their appetite for making a real contribution to society.

Contemporary literary criticism draws a lot from the structuralist insight that all forms of knowledge have within them a structure, or a form, that comes before the content; and this being so, to learn literary criticism is to parse through information and to have easier access to what is necessary in any body of knowledge, such that you may retain what is necessary for a thing to be what it is, while making changes to what is contingent so that the thing may be improved. This also allows one to see what is completely unnecessary and only seems so through implication drawn from the contingent appearance, rather than the necessary, a prior structure. Further, literary criticism is about reading and learning. Practically, one learns to learn, and how other eras have learned about themselves and their World; and one may apply this in any job market by being able to learn at a level that is more fundamental, especially considering the skill mentioned above. This is especially valuable when entering a radically different or novel field.

Some may not consider being a management consultant a "real world" skill, but I remember something like half of the guys who went to McKinsey, BCG, and Bain from Pomona College one year were English majors.

- pattern recognition - trend setting - psycholinguistic analysis - persuade, dupe and/or seduce your audience - intellectually bully someone (is this a joke?! Hmmm) - talk about anything but nothing

There are none. Unless you consider literature itself to be a part of the "real world", and you value deeply the experience of drawing close to it.