My boss is writing a LOR and wants to know what to emphasize

[Guest tguidici]

So, my boss is writing me a letter of recommendation for my applications to Statistics/Applied math PhD and masters programs for the fall of 2012. I don't think he has ever written a letter of recommendation like this before, and he's not sure what things he should emphasize/include in the letter. He has offered to let me write the letter, but I declined (we reached the compromise that I would look it over when he was done with it).

A little background to help with my query:

I work for a small consumer marketing research company as a data analyst. My boss is the president of our company, and has worked at a major consumer product company in the past, as well as being a test pilot for the Navy previous to that (and probably some other stuff I don't know about!).

I didn't know anything about consumer marketing research when I started my job (over 4 years ago), so I had a pretty steep learning curve, and i think I acquitted myself fairly well. I've done a pretty good job of independently learning whatever I need to know for the job, being detail oriented, hard working (working late/on weekends whenever necessary), coming up with clever solutions to difficult/annoying/complex problems, etc etc.

My initial suggestion to him was that he should mention/emphasize the following: my ability to solve complex problems, my ability to learn independently, and my research experience (i have a little bit of research experience as an undergrad, but it was all pretty minor).

What else should I suggest that he write about? (if it helps answer that, my other two recommenders are professors from my undergrad (which is now 6+ years in the past) - one of whom was my professor for a lower level class, my academic advisor, and who I worked for on small several projects/activities, and the other was my professor for one class, and with whom I also worked on another project. )

thanks!

[Javiar]

Since PhD is going to be researchy, I would ensure the major emphasis of the LoR should be on how good of a researcher you were .. irrespective of the relevance of ur current work to proposed PhD. That is showing potential to think deep, harness and siff through tonnes of resources etc etc