Our Five Favorite Career Books
Are you ready for your next career step?
Here are five of our favorite books to help get more clarity on what you want in your career and navigate the career transition process.
1. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life - this book summarizes the most popular course taught at Stanford and contains tools and exercises that help you design your future career and life vision and move toward it using small, concrete actions. We love how the authors apply design thinking principles to the job search, as we firmly believe there is no way to find out what you want to do without trying different things.
2. The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster - almost everyone struggles with networking at some point. After coaching hundreds of MBA students trying to land jobs, this book’s author Steve Dalton came up with a system to make the process of networking clearer and easier to execute. We appreciate his explanation about why a networking approach to your job search is so critical and how he breaks the process into actionable steps. This book shares a revealing look at how the hiring process has changed, why the current system is broken, and what you can do about it.
3. StrengthsFinder 2.0 - We often recommend Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment as a way to get clarity on your top strengths. This is the companion book, and includes descriptions of all 34 strengths as well as action steps you can take to better utilize yours. Knowing your core strengths is the foundation of any transition, so if you don’t yet feel solid on that, this is a great place to start.
4. Pivot - If "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up" is a statement that's ever resonated for you, you'll probably like this one! It's centered around the philosophy that change happens through small steps, not through big leaps, and that taking some action is the key to avoid getting stuck, and it has lots of exercises and activities that will help get you moving toward your next step.
5. Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success - understanding what motivates people is important as you navigate the job search process. Today, more than ever, to get a job, you are fundamentally reliant on people’s willingness to help you. If you’ve ever thought about karma in the job search and networking process or wondered why some people are so helpful to you while others can’t seem to be bothered, we highly recommend this book. Happy reading, and we'd love to hear what you think of these books and others that you've found helpful in your career journey.
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