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Table of Contents
Part I: Setting the Stage for Your
Career Change
Chapter 1: Evaluating Your Current Situation
Chapter 2: Opening Yourself to Discovery
Chapter 3: Uncovering the Real You
Chapter 4: Envisioning Your Dream Lifestyle
Chapter 5: Figuring Out How to Structure Your Work
Chapter 6: Defining Your Preferred Workplace
Part II: Finding Your Passions
Chapter 7: Uncovering Skills That Make Time Fly
Chapter 8: Discovering Topics That Make You Sizzle with Excitement
Chapter 9: Brainstorming Intriguing Career Ideas
Chapter 10: Sifting Out Your Most Intriguing Dream Careers
Part III: Exploring Possible Career
Directions
Chapter 11: Considering Communicating Careers
Chapter 12: Exploring Scientific/Logical Careers
Chapter 13: Thinking Outside the Box with Creative Careers
Part IV: Bringing Your Dream Career to Life
Chapter 14: Researching Your Top Two Career
Ideas
Chapter 15: Asking the Right Questions about Your Top Two
Careers
Chapter 16: Merging Your Personal Life with Your Dream Career
Chapter 17: Reconciling Differences between Your Life and
Your Dream Career
Chapter 18: Moving Ever Closer to Your Immediate Goal
Chapter 19: Turning Your Dream Career into a Reality
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 20: Ten Ways to Confirm Your Dream
Career Won’t Be a Nightmare
Chapter 21: Ten Creative Ways to Make the Leap to Your Dream
Career
By Richard Bolles, author of What Color Is
Your Parachute
Most forewords are written to urge you to read the
book. But I know you are going to
like this book, so you need no urging there.
What I want to urge in this foreword is something
else, and that is the importance of career change,
and more particularly, the importance of considering a career
change in your own life.
Experts tell us that the average person goes through
the job hunt eight times. I have observed that each
time we go through a job hunt, we face a crossroads: Should
we do a mechanical job search, or should we do a life-changing
job search?
The mechanical job search is basically a matching
process. It is so mechanical, even the Internet can
do it for us. Your resume. All the employers’ job openings.
Is there a match? The site’s “robot” will
give you the news by morning. That’s the mechanical
job search.
The life-changing job search is different.
If the mechanical job search starts with the labor market
as “the given,” the life-changing job search starts
with you as “the given.” The mechanical job search
assumes that you’re going to go on doing basically what
you were doing before, but the life-changing job search assumes
that all bets are off. You have certain transferable skills.
They can be used anywhere. So, where would you most like to
work? What would you most like to do for the rest of your
life? Dream, dream, dream. More often than you can imagine,
those dreams can be turned into reality!
A life-changing job search is, of course, just another
phrase for “career-change.” But I call
it life-changing, because it involves so much more than just
changing your career. In fact, there are four things that
inevitably get weighed in a life-changing job search.
The first is the center of your life, which
involves a reconsideration of what you want your life to revolve
around. If it’s currently work, do you want it to be
family instead; or if it’s currently making money, do
you want it to be God instead? That sort of thing.
The second is the constants in your life.
What about you has remained constant through all these years?
Your skills, your values, your friends, what? Do an inventory,
and then put these in their order of importance.
The third is the context of your life. What
gives you perspective about your life? How do you measure
how well you’re doing in life? For many, this context
of their life is God. If that’s not yours, what is?
The fourth (and final) one is alternatives.
You need to ask yourself how many alternative ways you have
of describing what you most enjoy doing. How many alternative
ways do you have of describing your target organizations or
plans? How many alternative ways do you have of searching
for that? A life-changing job search is a search for alternatives,
so as to have more freedom.
If it’s a life-changing job search you’re
weighing, that is to say, a career-change, plus, you can do
no better than to read this book. It’s one
of the best I’ve ever read on career change. Carol has
really done her homework, and she offers very many helpful
ideas to guide you on your way.
$17.00 |
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