What Color Is Your Parachute? 2012: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers Anniversary Edition
Author(s): Richard Nelson Bolles (Author)
- Publisher: Ten Speed Press
- Publication Date: 16 Aug. 2011
- Edition: Anniversary
- Language: English
- Print length: 336 pages
- ISBN-10: 1607740109
- ISBN-13: 9781607740100
Book Description
The 40th Edition. This is not your fathers Parachute; and not your mothers, either. Theyd be astounded at the changes. This book keeps building--in insight, helpfulness, relevance, and urgency--through new invention and information each year. And this year its the critical resource to help Americans (and others) get back to work.
For forty years now job-hunters and career-changers have been turning to this,
the worlds most popular job-hunting book, confident that each new annual edition will give them the most up-to-date information about the job-market and how to find meaningful work--even in the midst of challenging economic times such as these.
This years edition of
What Color Is Your Parachute? has been vastly rewritten, because job-hunting has increasingly become a survival skill. Career expert Richard N. Bolles describes the five strategies most needed to survive, and explains how to incorporate social media tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter into your job-search.
The new ideas are wrapped around the familiar core message of
Parachute: WHAT, WHERE, and HOW, with an emphasis on finding your passion and identifying your best transferable skills. With fresh insights into resumes, networking, interviewing, salary negotiation, and how to start your own business, this book will give you the tools, exercises, and motivation you need to find hope, land a job, and fulfill your purpose in life. In the words ofFortune magazine:
Parachute remains the gold standard of career guides.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“No one has been writing best-selling career-advice books longer than Richard Bolles.”
—Wall Street Journal, 9/15/11
“
What Color Is Your Parachute? is about job-hunting and career-changing, but it’s also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life.”
—Time
“. . . one of the first job-hunting books on the market. It is still arguably the best. And it is indisputably the most popular.”
—Fast Company
“Bolles knows what he’s talking about: his practical job-hunting strategies are based on years of research, and best of all, they really work.”
—School Library Journal
“Ideally, everyone should read What Color Is Your Parachute? in the tenth grade and again every year thereafter.”
—Fortune
“There’s Parachute, and then there’s all the rest. . . . a life-changing book.”
—Career Planning and Adult Development Journal
“Parachute is still a top seller and it remains the go-to guide for everyone from midlife-crisis boomers looking to change their careers to college students looking to start one.”
—New York Post
About the Author
Richard N. Bolles has led the career development field for more than forty years. A member of Mensa and the Society for Human Resource Management, he has been the keynote speaker at hundreds of conferences. Bolles was trained in chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and holds a bachelors degree cum laude in physics from Harvard University, a masters in sacred theology from General Theological (Episcopal) Seminary in New York City, and three honorary doctorates. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Marci. Visit http://www.jobhuntersbible.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1. How to Find Hope
If we had such a thing as a national bumper-sticker for our cars, the bumper-sticker of the year would be: “I’m out of work, I can’t find a job, and I’ve tried everything.”
Of course not everyone would display it; some 139,000,000 people in the U.S. have jobs, after all. But some 15,000,000 do not. And 6,000,000 of them would display it for longer than twenty-seven months. That’s how many have currently been out of work that long. Just here in the U.S. Beyond these shores, well, tragically high unemployment is a worldwide problem, as we have seen throughout the Middle East this year, and other restless nations of the world.
Everywhere we go, these days, we hear this cry: “I’ve been out of work forever, and I can’t find a job, no matter how hard I try.” And we do try hard. Often in vain. We are thrown out of work, we go looking for work the way we always used to, but this time we come up empty. This is a brand new experience for many of us. And one that we didn’t see coming. Nothing works. Unemployment drags on.
This shakes us emotionally to our core, and often leads to a plunge in our self-esteem. Those twins, depression and despair, frequently follow hard on its heels. Life feels like it is never going to get any better. This feels like forever. (I know. Like any normal American, I’ve been thrown out of work twice in my life. It was not fun.)
What do we need?
Well, we desperately need a job. Of course.
But more than that, while we are out of work we desperately, desperately, need Hope.
THE KEY TO FINDING HOPE
Experts have discovered, over the years, what is the key to Hope. And it is just this: Hope requires that, in every situation, we have at least two alternatives.
Not just one way to describe ourselves, but two ways, at least.
Not just one way to hunt for a job, but two ways, at least.
Not just one kind of job to hunt for, but two kinds of jobs, at least.
Not just one size company to go after, but two sizes, at least.
Not just one place we really would like to work at, but two places, at least.
And so on. And so forth.
In order to have Hope while you are out of work, you have to make sure that in every situation you find yourself, you’re not putting all your eggs in just one basket.
To have only one plan, one option, is a sure recipe for despair. I’ll give you a simple example. In a study of 100 job-hunters who were using only one method to hunt for a job, typically 51 abandoned their search by the second month. That’s more than half of them. They lost Hope. On the other hand, of 100 job-hunters who were using two or more different ways of hunting for a job, typically only 31 of them abandoned their search by the second month. That’s less than one-third of them.
The latter kept going because they had Hope. And so this truth should always be on your mind:
If you are to hold on to Hope you must determine to always have at least two alternatives, in everything that you are doing while looking for work.
A LIST OF JOB-FINDING ALTERNATIVES
Just to be sure we’re “choosing cards from a full deck,” let’s rehearse what are the alternative options we have, when we’re out of work. There are eighteen different ways of looking for work. You probably know many of them, but just for the sake of completeness, let’s list them all. They are:
1. Self-Inventory. You do a thorough self-inventory of the transferable skills and knowledges that you most enjoy using, so you can define to yourself just exactly what it is you have to offer the world, and exactly what job(s) you would most like to find.
2. The Internet. 82 percent of Americans now go online, for an average of nineteen hours per week apiece. If you’re among them, and your goal is to work for someone else, you use the Internet to post your resume and/or to look for employers’ “job-postings” (vacancies) on the employer’s own website or elsewhere (with omnibus job-search sites such as Indeed or SimplyHired, and of course specific “job-boards” such as CareerBuilder, Yahoo/Hot Jobs, Monster, LinkUp, Hound, “niche sites” for particular industries [see http://www.internetinc.com/job-search-websites for a directory], and non-job sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or the immensely popular Craigslist). If, on the contrary, you’re considering working for yourself, you use the Internet to learn how to do this, how to establish your brand, and how to get the word out to a wider audience as to just what you have to offer.
3. Networking. You ask friends, family, or people in the community for “job-leads” (rhymes with “Bob reads”). There are two ways of doing this, one sort of blah, one really useful. In the first case, you use the lame “I lost my job; if you hear of anything, let me know,” which leaves your network completely baffled as to what you’re looking for, unless it’s same old same old of what you’ve always done. Far better way: after using method #1 above, you tell them in specific detail what you mean by “anything.” And then see how close they can come to that.
4. School. School means high school, trade schools, online schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, or universities. You ask a former professor or teacher or your career/alumni office at schools that you attended if they have any job-leads.
5. The Feds. You go to your local federal/state unemployment service office, or to their OneStop career centers (directory at http://www.careeronestop.org) to get instruction on how to better job-hunt, and also to find job-leads.
6. Private employment agencies. You go to the private analog to the federal/state agencies (directory of such agencies can be found at http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/State_and_Territories.shtml).
7. Civil Service. You take a civil service exam to compete for a government job (http://federaljobs.net/exams.htm and/or http://tinyurl.com/9vyfqe).
8. Newspapers. You answer local “want-ads” (in newspapers, assuming your city or town still has a newspaper, online or in print, or both). The Sunday editions usually prove most useful. See http://tinyurl.com/d58l8z for how to use them; for a directory of their online versions, see http://www.newslink.org. There is also a site that lets you see current news about any industry that is of interest to you (where vacancies have just opened up??), at http://www.congoo.com/Industry.
9. Journals. You look at professional journals in your profession or field, and answer any ads there that intrigue you (directory at http://tinyurl.com/dlfsdz).
10. Temp Agencies. You go to temp agencies (agencies that get you short-term contracts in places that need your time and skills temporarily) and see if the agency/agencies can place you, in one place after another, until some place that you really like says, “Could you stay on, permanently?” At the very least you’ll pick up experience that you can later cite on your resume (directory of such agencies, and people’s ratings of them, at http://www.rateatemp.com/temp-agency-list).
11. Day Laborers. You go to places where employers pick up day workers: well-known street corners in your town (ask around), or union halls, etc., in order for you to get short-term work, for now, which may lead to more permanent work,...
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