What Color Is Your Parachute? Job-Hunter's Workbook

Excerpt

Preface
 
Why a workbook for job-hunters and career-changers? Wouldn’t a job application form be more to the point?
 
Nope. It wouldn’t be. U.S. government statistics reveal that even in the most difficult of times at least three million people find jobs each month, and yet another two million vacancies remain unfilled. So, there are jobs out there, and millions are finding them. What is the secret of these successful job-hunters? Well, three things:
 
1 They work smarter. They know what job-hunting methods work best, and they invest their time wisely as a result. Highest among successful job-hunting methods is Beginning Your Job Hunt by Inventorying Yourself.
 
2 They work harder. They are willing to put in the time necessary to find appropriate careers and appropriate job-openings. They don’t expect someone else--the government, private agencies, or other parts of “officialdom”--to do the job for them. They are willing to take the time to do a detailed inventory of who they are, doing some hard thinking, as in this Workbook.
 
3 They work longer. Once they have a detailed inventory of who they are, they go out looking for a job that matches that. In hard times or in a period coming out of hard times, it often takes far longer to find a job than most job-hunters anticipate. Successful job-hunters or career-changers can keep at it for many months, if necessary, because they have the energy. That energy is born of enthusiasm--they have defined a job they would just die to do, and they are determined to find it, or something as close to it as possible.
 
This is in contrast to job-hunters who don’t take the time or trouble to figure out what work they would most delight to do, and therefore plod through their job-hunt, easily tired, easily discouraged, looking for a job that leaves them uninspired.
 
What Color Is Your Parachute? Job-Hunter’s Workbook is therefore your key to greatly increasing your chances of finding work, provided you’re willing to work smarter, work harder, and work longer than most job-hunters. The author is Dick Bolles, more formally known as Richard N. Bolles, author of the most successful job-hunting book in history--with ten million copies sold to date, and used in twenty-six countries around the world. This Workbook is a companion to that classic job-search guide, What Color Is Your Parachute? (revised and updated annually).
 
This full-color Job-Hunter’s Workbook (also revised), with its user-friendly exercises and simple step-by-step worksheets, will illuminate your favorite transferable skills, fields of knowledge, people-environments, working conditions, levels of responsibility and salary, values, and goals. Once you’ve completed the workbook, you’ll have a comprehensive picture of your dream job, and be able to pursue it with hope.
 
 
The Flower Exercise

A Picture of the Job of Your Dreams
 
In order to hunt for your ideal job, or even something close to your ideal job, you must have a picture of it, in your head. The clearer the picture, the easier it will be to hunt for it. The purpose of this exercise is to guide you as you draw that picture.
 
I have chosen a “Flower” as the model for that picture. While such expressions as “plugging in,” “turning on,” and other common phrases portray you (implicitly) as a machine, you are actually much more like a Flower than a machine. That is to say, you flourish in some job environments, but wither in others. Therefore, the purpose of putting together this Flower Diagram of yourself is to help you identify what kind of a work climate you will flourish in, and thus do your very best work. Your twin goals should be to be as happy as you can be at your job, while at the same time doing your most effective work.
 
There is a picture of the Flower on pages 2–3 that you can use as your worksheet.
 
As you can see, skills are at the center of the Flower, even as they are at the center of your mission, career, or job. They are listed in order of priority.
 
Surrounding them are six petals. Listed in the order in which you will work on them, they are:
 
1 Values
2 Special Knowledges
3 People-Environments
4 Working Conditions
5 Level of Responsibility and Salary
6 Geography
 
When you are done filling in these skills and petals, you will have the complete Flower Diagram of your Ideal Job. Okay? Then, get out your pen or pencil and let’s get started.
 
 
Example (Six Favorite Skills)
 
When it comes time to inventory what you have to offer to an employer, it’s helpful to know that you basically have three different kinds of skills to offer them:
 
1 Knowledge or Subject Skills. These are usually nouns, like “computers,” “applied mathematics,” “dancing,” “digital design,” etc. Think of your head as a filing cabinet. You have a lot of knowledge stored in there, about various subjects. These make you an asset to particular companies. Because you can use these files, these are indeed skills.
 
2 Functional or Transferable Skills. These are usually verbs, like “analyzing,” “mentoring,” “cooking,” etc. They are functions you are able to do. But because they are transferable to other fields, without going back to school for retraining, they are called transferable skills; e.g., if you’re good at “gathering information,” in one field, you’re probably just as good at “gathering information” in another field. Completely transferable.
 
3 Self-Management Skills, Often Called Traits. These are usually adjectives or adverbs, like “systematic,” or “persistent,” or “thorough.” They describe the manner in which you do some of your Transferable Skills.
 
We begin, here, with inventorying your Transferable Skills.

Excerpted from What Color Is Your Parachute? Job-Hunter's Workbook by Richard N. Bolles. Copyright © 2010 by Richard N. Bolles. Excerpted by permission of Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.