TORC

Bookstores and libraries can offer lots of career management help

The career section in bookstores and libraries continues to expand, as career management becomes more and more a mainstream activity for everyone. Some new entrants to appear in 2010 include: 

1. The Great Mid-life Career Switch: 15 important tips to help you change careers at half-time 
The author, Gordon Adams, is based in the UK.  This is a shorter and complementary volume to his related 2009 book, Overcoming Redundancy.  The 64 page booklet is set out in 15 short chapters offering crisp & succinct tips to assist career changers. An appendix gives details of some supporting UK online resources.  

2. How to Get a Job You’ll Love 2011-2012 Edition 
This is the latest in a number of career coaching books from the Cheshire-based Anglican minister, John Lees. It provides copious exercises forcing the reader to think through one’s options and one’s marketability to an employer. It  deals comprehensively with the practicalities of job-hunting, CV creation, job-hunting by social media, and interview preparations. And,  importantly, it also explores the subject of how to better develop a career with one’s current employer – offering lots of advice on how to get a promotion. 

3. The Complete Career Makeover 
This is by Nic Paton, a freelance journalist with the Guardian, who writes on business, employment, education, money and health. The book explores pertinent career issues, including picking yourself up after redundancy, retraining, starting up a business and self employment and freelancing. It offers numerous case studies, personal stories of people who have actually gone through the career change process – complete with details about how their new lives turned out. A particular emphasis is put on various aspects of ‘being one’s own boss’.

4. Choose A Career And Discover Your Perfect Job: 105 Tips On Work Attitude And Motivation
This book comes from Belgium EQ coach,  Patrick Merlevede. It offers 105 tips to be acted on over 15 weeks and draws a lot of its inspiration from the JobEQ personality instrument, which identifies 48 patterns of behaviour that are critical to career success. The intention of the book is to allow readers use a framework of strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes to guide their career development.

5. Your Complete Guide to Job Search and Career Change
This is written from the perspective of a recruiter, Ken Murdock, based in Austin, Texas. It places a great emphasis on how a candidate needs to stand out from the crowd. Accordingly it focuses on self-marketing techniques to get noticed. It begins with the premise that:

“The first step is to get someone to notice you. Someone has
to say to themselves, “this person looks interesting – I think
I would like to talk to him/her. Until that happens, nothing
else you do matters, not even a little bit”.

PS. For further career management tips, please click on the following Torc links:
1. interview preparation
2. panel interviews
3. the interview X-factor
4. assessment centres
5. franchising options
6. career change 
7. career iPhone apps.

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