They're not known as secret agents for nothing. If you like bragging about your achievements or posting constant status updates on Facebook, this probably isn't the profession for you. With some secret government agencies, you're not supposed to tell family and friends you're even applying. Then, if you're accepted, you're not allowed to tell anybody other than your partner who you really work for.

Spying has a specialist language all of its own. Do you know the difference between SIGINT and HUMINT? Who is "Control?" Would you know what a brush pass or a black bag job is and are you familiar with window dressing and walk-ins? Whether you're trying to snare the rezident with a honeypot or set a canary trap to find a mole, there's a lot of language to learn.

If you're going to join the CIA or MI6 (James Bond's employer), language skills are crucial. Forget about high school Spanish — it's time to bone up on your Azerbaijani, Urdu, or Dari. Top linguists are expected to master not just the language, but regional dialects and slang as well.

Because secret agent movies have been around for so long, they have the power to unconsciously inform the actions of the spy world. Packages that arrive via special delivery are probably bombs. Secret agents staying in hotels should be wary of a knock at the door from "room service" — the caller is probably part of a hit squad...

If you like math, crossword puzzles or Sudoku you could have the skills to be a code-maker or a code-breaker. Gone are the days of burning one-time pad ciphers or capturing Enigma machines. Today's spies are often the best hackers. To crack a code encrypted by a 128-bit hashtag algorithm, a cyber spy would have to have the code-breaking skills to figure out which of the 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,300 (x 11) available combinations was the right one.

Whether it's hacking into a terrorist's laptop or keeping your agency's email accounts spam-free, there are plenty of IT vacancies in the world of spying. The Stuxnet worm, a particularly malicious computer virus, crippled the Iranian nuclear program in 2010. Despite the fact that halting Iran's nuclear development has been a long-term goal, neither the CIA nor Mossad (Israel's spy agency) claim any knowledge of this cyber coup...

There are also low-tech solutions to secret communications. Steganography, or the art of writing secret messages, goes back to the days of the pharaohs. Whereas a code can be read by anyone who knows the key, the meaning of a steganographic message must be decided in advance. But once that is done, messages can be concealed in shopping lists, graffiti, wanted ads, or even in invisible ink.

While running away from exploding vehicles in slow motion is a commendable spy skill, so is the less glamorous task of studying. Many of the best intelligence breakthroughs come from analyzing documents, making connections, and spotting significant details.

Secret agents must be able to drive a variety of vehicles on both the right and left sides of the road. Ideally, they should be able to drive well enough to attract no unwanted attention, but sometimes drag racing during a gun battle is also necessary. When on foot and chasing someone in a car, secret agents should be able to instantly flag down a cab and say "follow that car" in a commanding voice.

For field agents, disguise is important. They should be able to melt into a crowd and may need to change their appearance rapidly, perhaps by means of a reversible coat, an extra hat, or a scarf. Secret agents can't be too obvious — trench coats, sunglasses, and plastic mustaches should probably be avoided.

Following someone without being noticed helps a spy learn about his subject's daily routine or secret destination. To shake a tail, take a lesson from The Godfather and make a sudden move — whipping your car over the median in a high speed U-turn usually does the trick. Just make sure you've really lost your tail or you'll end up like Sonny Corleone.

Abu Ghraib-style interrogation doesn't usually work. It is a subtle art that requires intuition and subtle body clues. Finding out the truth can be as simple as looking someone in the eye. Excessive blinking often means that someone is lying, whereas dilated pupils indicate relaxation and, therefore, truthfulness.

This colorful sport is no longer just for preteen birthday parties. The skills of a successful paintballer are necessary for spies and weekend warriors alike: quietly moving through a dense terrain, approaching an enemy unseen, changing tactics based on new intelligence, and making a clean headshot at 100 yards.

Before the days of email, spies would communicate through dead drops — leaving hidden information for someone to pick up later. Since spies were constantly tailed, the best way to achieve a dead drop was to make a right hand turn around the corner of a building, allowing four to five precious seconds of "blind time," enough for a trained spy to surreptitiously hide something.

And speaking of dead drops, one of the most effective hiding places was inside the body of a dead rat or pigeon. A secret agent would insert a waterproof packet of information inside the chest cavity of a pungent piece of road kill and then drop it out of moving vehicle during the "blind time" of a sharp turn. Humans stayed away from the rotting stench and animal predators were kept at bay by soaking the top-secret corpses in pepper spray.

Even though very little spy craft involves the chase scenes for which Bond is so famous, a spy still needs to be in good shape. Most positions require you to run a 9-minute mile and do at least 40 push-ups and 45 sit-ups to even be eligible for consideration.

Some spy craft involves really cool toys. You can easily buy a camera-pen or camera-watch on the internet. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips are implanted under the skins of our pets. If this sort of technology is readily available to the public, just imagine what kind of spy gadgets has Q (or the Bond character's real-life equivalent) will cook up next.

Despite what Jason Bourne may have you thinking, becoming a secret agent doesn't mean entering a life of crime. Spies pick pockets for information, not monetary gains. A successful pick involves both subtlety and distraction. For instance, a woman might tell a man an amusing story and touch his arm with her left hand to distract him from the fact that her right hand is carefully lifting information from his coat pocket.

The same slight of hand needed to pick a pocket is simply reversed when planting a bug. Whether a tracking device is attached to a collar during a hug or a listening device is affixed to the arm of a chair during an interview, subtlety is the key to a successful plant. Ex-CIA Director William J. Casey is said to have personally planted a bug in a foreign leader's office.

In the bad old days, the CIA experimented with LSD and other mind-altering drugs as a way to get informants to talk. Since most informants had to remain unsuspecting, the Agency hired magician John Mulholland to write a manual on how to use slight of hand to slip a pill, powder, or liquid into someone's drink. Mulholland's manual, Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception, has since been declassified and stands as a testament to the fact that spies will use pretty much anything if it gets the job done.

While this isn't essential to the spy game, it can't hurt to be a smooth talker when a possible source of information is interested in spending the night...