Most job-hunters who fail to find their dream job, fail not because they lack information about the job-market, but because they lack information about themselves.
—Richard N. Bolles
That’s quite a statement, and to borrow from Stephen Colbert, you can see the truthiness of it. Can’t you? How many times have you been in the market for a new job and told yourself that this time it would be different, this time you would find work you could love? And that’s the trick isn’t it? To get paid to do something you actually enjoy doing. Many people scoff at the idea, saying that work isn’t meant to be fun, it’s work.
Bolles disagrees, he feels that a person can find work they actually enjoy; call it your life’s mission, your purpose, your dream job, it doesn’t really matter what name it goes by, it’s your life and it’s time to start living it they way you want to live it.¹ The entire second part of Parachute is devoted to examining yourself, finding out what it is you really want from life and applying that knowledge in finding your next job, work that is exciting and enticing instead of numbing and boring.
Be warned, The Parachute Workbook is one of the more thorough personal inventories to be found in a mere job hunting book, and you should be prepared to do some serious soul searching. Various areas of the self are examined, including the tried and true, such as transferable skills and what kind of work you prefer. But Parachute goes a step or two further: what kind of people do you prefer working with, where would you really like to live, who are you and what skills do you really prefer to use and what are you really good at? Even if the whole exercise doesn’t help you find your life’s work, the information you gain about yourself will be invaluable in the future, drawing you ever closer to that dream job you’ve envisioned.
There are many books on the market that claim they’ll help you find your next job, and they may work swimmingly for you or someone you know, but if you’ve found the plethora of job hunting titles somewhat lacking and impersonal, you owe it to yourself to check out Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute; used in conjunction with the vast job hunting resources of the web, like 360jobinterview.com, you just might stumble upon the work you’ve always dreamed of.
