on annabelle's bookshelf

What Color Is Your Parachute?
by Richard Nelson Bolles

There are a variety of career guides out there. Some encourage movement and change. They root for their readers, like personal Tony Robbinses in portable paperback. They describe a golden world which offers complete professional fulfillment, causing happiness to giddily spill from the "I've-found-my-calling!" area of your life into all others. After reading these books, meaningful, high paying, exciting work is yours forever. Other job books offer solace like that found at the neighborhood bar. But it's beyond last call. The last rough shot of cheap whiskey goes down burning. There's no last cigarette. The bartender who sees you every day is fed up and refuses to call you a cab, and the worst blizzard in years is raging outside. In this work world, one's very survival is questionable.

What Color Is Your Parachute? falls into the giddy-happy-exciting category. Now in its 30th edition, more than 8 million copies of it have been sold. It has built a huge following over many years, is handed out by career counselors and used in job-search seminars everywhere. If you haven't read it, someone has at least told you to read it or has mentioned it to you. If you've ever set foot in a brick-and-mortar bookstore's job/work section, you've seen its trademark rainbow parachute floating above you.

How does the best job book ever maintain its continued job-search genius? Its author "stunnningly"(his word) revises it for each year's edition. Each new version has additional, accurate revelations about the profession hunt, some relating to new technology's effects on how people find jobs and others to how society is changing in regards to work. In this year's edition, there's even a timely mention on how Hurricane Katrina affected the United States' job outlook.

Here are a few surprising revelations from Parachute:

1. Sending out one's resume all over the place is NOT an effective way to find a job. (As a consolation, Mr. Bolles offers effective ways, with an effectiveness percentage rating, to grab jobs.)

2. There are ALWAYS job openings out there (even though at first glance it may not appear so).

3. People who observe the 50-50 rule during interviews—spending roughly equal time talking and listening—tend to get hired more often than those who don't.

Parachute is packed with other compelling, useful statistics. Its congenial tone makes it accessible and enjoyable to read. If you don't actually use this book to get a job, you will most likely learn much about the American get-a-job process. Then you can show off your newly acquired skills, helping friends and family members find jobs. Sounds like a new, exciting career already!

You will benefit from What Color Is Your Parachute? if you want to know yourself better, are ready to do some work, and want a change. Brush off your power-interview suit, for after much thought, creativity, determination and energy, it will be your time to visit career nirvana. You, and your life, will be happier for it.

Crap Jobs: 100 Tales of Workplace Hell
Edited by Dan Kieran

In the drunken-depressing-snowbound type of work world, many complain of jobs they detest. But when faced with actually leaving a place—and all one's "work friends," stable routine, boss who lets you come in at varying degrees of lateness each day, and favorite java joint right around the corner with a barista who gets the foam on your triple-skim, no-fat latte as no other barista in the entire metropolis can—many will opt for the horrific, familiar devil over an unknown, possibly worse one. If this describes you, then Crap Jobs should be your current job manual.

While some passages of this riveting yet depressing job book are hysterical and unbelievable, reading this book will most likely affirm your job status quo. How? Because it is unlikely that what you currently do could be as humiliating, disgusting, "soul-destroying" or potentially dangerous as the "career opportunities" that Crap Jobs contributors endured, including maggot farmer, chili sauce bottler, battery breaker, pie hole maker, and North Sea Ferry cabin cleaner.

Here's a teaser from "Model:"

"Modeling isn't all coke and catwalks, you know. If you want someone with an enormous beard and you'd like to splat their beard with a custard pie for a kids TV program, then you'd call my agency, who'd call me."

And an excerpt from "Garlic Grader:"

"I suppose I dreamed it would be dead French and romantic, passing the summer months getting back to nature, working in the fields, bronzed, dusty and physically exhausted by the end of each day, watching the sun set over a glass of wine. Bollocks. There was a fight every other day, which tested your wits and agility if you inadvertently got caught in the crossfire. (The weapon of choice was the aforementioned pruning shears.) And when these gimps weren't fighting they were trying to smoke the stuff."

And it goes from there.

To glean the most from this book, I recommend that you and a friend, preferably one with a strong stomach, read and digest these true stories in small doses. Plus, it's more fun to share.

-Kira Simms

 

your dream job :: you are so fired :: having it all (sorta) :: the office crush: tim vs. jim :: buy the book, find your career :: the three jobs everyone should have (at some point) :: home

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