Essential Books for the Job Search
With layoffs on the rise amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of people have found themselves scrambling to secure a new job. Though the search can be daunting, there are many resources available to support job seekers as they navigate the process—several of which are available right here on our website! Spanning topics such as finding the right job, developing your professional skills, and forging your own unique path, these five books offer valuable insights for readers at any stage in their career.
The Job Search Navigator is a comprehensive guide to finding a new job in today’s evolving career marketplace. Author Matt Durfee writes from the perspective of someone who has both recruited for some of America’s biggest companies and navigated his way through nine of his own job losses. The book combines practical real-world perspectives with the technical knowledge job seekers need in order to excel at every aspect of their searches.
Durfee’s guidebook is particularly relevant for job seekers in need of concrete strategies for overcoming setbacks and continuing to move forward in their career.
Improvise
Improvise, by GolinHarris CEO Fred Cook, is an inspiring story of how Cook followed an unusual yet fascinating path from young adulthood to the corner office. The book combines Cook’s lifetime of uncommon experiences with his insights from a successful corporate career, as a means to help recent graduates and young entrepreneurs uncover the professional skills that exist outside any traditional office.
Improvise is a great read for those looking to lean into their own unusual career paths and embrace their unique skill sets in order to find career success.
Let’s Go Invent Tomorrow
This book collects 365 thought-provoking and inspiring quotations that are packed with insights on business, management, and leadership from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Curated from the best quotes in the In Their Own Words series, this book provides future leaders, aspiring entrepreneurs, and business professionals with a full year’s worth of advice and perspective from visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Jack Ma, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and more.
Honest and uplifting, Let’s Go Invent Tomorrow is perfect for those looking to feel inspired and reassured in these trying times.
Lasting Contribution
A powerful dose of wisdom in a concise package, Lasting Contribution is filled with profound and effective advice on how to make the kinds of contributions—to work, to organizations, to communities—that really matter. Drawing from such varied sources as Aristotle, Sun Tzu, Victor Frankl, and Confucius, this book marshals insights that touch on information theory, sociology, Zen, psychology, art history, management theory, and other fields.
Though not explicitly about the job hunt, Lasting Contribution offers fascinating advice on how to enrich and find meaning in work inside and outside of the office.
Life Skills
How do you give a good wedding toast? How do you fix a clogged drain? How do you end a relationship? Collected from the popular “Life Skills” column in the Chicago Tribune, this book is filled with often humorous instructions on performing tasks that many of us have never gotten around to figuring out. Some are truly useful explanations of technical topics, while others are good for a laugh or cover the more ambiguous areas of relationships, careers, and social interaction. With chapters on home economics, the office, recreation, and social issues, Life Skills is a unique guide to the many skills it takes a lifetime to learn and perfect.
This collection from the Chicago Tribune is an entertaining and informative read for those looking to develop all kinds of skills—professional, personal, and otherwise.