This post is for anyone whose New Year’s resolution is to make a career change, get a job, prepare for retirement, or simply figure out what to do for a living. For decades, What Color Is Your Parachute has been the go-to guide for job hunters and career changers. This book not only contains practical advice on all things related to finding new employment, more importantly, it’s filled with guides, quizzes and information to help the reader figure out his ideal career path.
What Color Is Your Parachute? 2013: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99)
The world’s most popular job-search book is updated for 2013 to tailor its long-trusted guidance with up-to-the-minute information and advice for today’s job-hunters and career-changers.
Career expert Richard (“Dick”) N. Bolles has now written forty-one books all with the same title: What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers. In order to tailor his authoritative guide to the current job market, Bolles not only updates the book each year, but he also reconceives it, reinvents it, and rewrites it, so that one year’s edition is often vastly different from the year before. This is the case with the 2013 edition. Inventions in the book this year include a brand-new transferable skills grid, a novel way to discover what fields you would most like to work in, and a revamped version of his famed self-inventory instrument, the Flower Exercise.
What Color Is Your Parachute? is the world’s most popular job-hunting guide, and it has helped millions discover their unique gifts, skills, and interests. This has allowed them to land a job even in hard times, and to create for themselves a new, interesting, and inspiring career and life.
With fresh insights into resumes, networking, interviewing, salary negotiation, entrepreneurship, and social media, What Color Is Your Parachute? has everything you need to dust off your motivation and find your dream job.
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Teens who are nearing high school graduation and are still undecided on a career path can get some excellent guidance in What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens, 2nd Edition: Discovering Yourself, Defining Your Future – What Color Is Your Parachute for Teens (4/5 stars, currently priced at $10.99):
In today’s über-competitive climate, you can’t just wing it when you graduate and count on finding a great job (or a great job finding you). It pays to figure out your interests early, so you can decide what additional schooling—and tuition debt—makes sense for your chosen field. In What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens, career authorities Carol Christen and Richard N. Bolles not only help you plan for these decisions, but also help you define the unique passions that will lead you to your dream job. With new chapters on social media and sustainable jobs—along with all-new profiles of twentysomethings who’ve found work in solar energy, magazine writing, and more—this new edition has all the nitty-gritty details you need to get started now. Most importantly, it’s packed with the big-picture advice that will set you up to land the job that’s perfect for who you are—and who you want to be.
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There’s a Parachute book for prospective retirees, too:
What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement, Second Edition: Planning a Prosperous, Healthy, and Happy Future (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99).
Today’s economic realities have reset our expectations of what retirement is, yet there’s still the promise for what it can be: a life stage filled with more freedom and potential than ever before. Given the new normal, how do you plan for a future filled with prosperity, health, and happiness? As a companion to What Color Is Your Parachute?, the world’s best-selling career book, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement offers both a holistic, big-picture look at these years as well as practical tools and exercises to help you build a life full of security, vitality, and community.
This second edition contains updates throughout, including a section on Social Security, an in-depth exercise on values and how they inform your retirement map, and the one-of-a-kind resource for organizing the sea of information on finances and mental and physical health: the Retirement Well-Being Profile. More than a guide on where to live, how to stay active, or which investments to choose, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement helps you develop a detailed picture of your ideal retirement, so that—whether you’re planning retirement or are there already—you can take a comprehensive approach to make the most of these vital years.