| A book outlining job-hunting skills and strategies first published in 1970 and written by Richard Bolles.
So you are looking for a job. The path that brought you to this place could have come from many different places. You may have grown tired and disillusioned with your present employer and decided that there was something better out there. You may desire higher pay, a better location, or more benefits than you present employer offers. You may be seeking more satisfaction or more challenges than that with which you are currently faced. You may have gotten sacked. But no matter the reason for looking for a new job, most people find the idea of marketing themselves a daunting task, and go seeking some guidance to help them. In 1970, Richard Bolles began providing such guidance in the form of the book What Color is Your Parachute?.
First, the name. The book derives its name from a response the author used to give to his friends and co-workers when they would talk about quitting their jobs. Often times, these friends would discuss "bailing out" of their jobs in hopes of finding something better and carrying the skydiving metaphor a bit farther, Bolles would ask them what color their parachute was.
What Color is Your Parachute? is a pretty comprehensive book on job searching and the hows and whys of the process. Bolles updates the book yearly to make sure that he is up-to-date on the trends in job searching, so that the reader has the latest information. The text is well-written and though it will never rival Dickens or Shakespeare, it is not as dull as most reading on the subject.
The book advocates not pursuing a traditional job search, which Bolles contends are generally unfruitful and lead most people back into the same kind of situations they have already experienced. Bolles also provides some pretty stunning statistics on the slim chances of success in pursuing a traditional job search. Instead, Bolles presents a compelling case for seeking to discover the skills that you really enjoy, the environment that inspires you, and seeking to find a job that use those skills in that environment. The book is full of exercises and straight forward advice on doing this, along with success stories of those who have and are enjoying jobs they never dreamed that they would enjoy.
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