Ultimate Guide to Getting the Career You Want

by Karen O. Dowd and Sherrie Gong Taguchi

This guide aims to help readers discover tools, concepts, and strategies for gaining career-building clarity. It helps readers to overcome job inertia, understand what makes a job right or wrong for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071402934
• ISBN13: 9780071402934
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Book for the Times--a Great Value

The employment market has been challenging over the past few years. Thousands upon thousands of people have been laid off, down-sized, mis-employed, under-employed. Recent surveys suggest that 30-40 percent of those who are employed are dissatisfied and looking for something better. What is better? It's more than just money. As we sit on the threshold of another wide open labor market, filled with bountiful opportunities for exciting career development, this is the time to take a deep breath and determine where you really want to go with your work life. Who are you, really? What's important to you in a career? Why? What do you have to offer---what are your strengths, your core competencies...and how do they relate to what you'd like to do? Curl up with this book and benefit from some enjoyable time with two authors who have invested a significant part of their lives counseling others in career design and development. In addition to other significant positions, Dowd served as director of Career Services at the Darden Graduate Business School of the University of Virginia and Taguchi served as director of the Stanford MBA Career Management Center. These backgrounds tell you that this book will be most valuable for educated professionals, though there is plenty of content to be helpful to less educated workers or those on the way up. The book is organized in a comfortable, easy-to-use format. First the authors help readers understand their history-what brought them to where they are today. If you're like most people, the past hasn't always been pretty. Understood. Dowd and Taguchi put the good, the bad, and the ugly into perspective as they focus you toward the future. In the second section of the book, you'll gain some deep understandings of who you are now-what drives you, what's important to you. With this foundation in place, the authors take you into your future career, building your confidence along the way. This book is not light, fun reading. You'll sit down with a serious how-to textbook that will take you through a tour of the career design and management process that will exceed anything you've done before. There's some deep stuff in these pages that make this book worth far more than the $14.95 list price. As if the text weren't enough, you'll benefit from five appendices, notes, and an index. Lots of tips on websites, writing resumes and cover letters, opportunity evaluation guides, and compensation negotiation tips. Anecdotes, case studies, exercises, and exercises add even more. If you are analyzing where you want to go next in your business or professional career, invest some time with this book. If your work includes advising others on their careers, this book, dog-eared, belongs on your reference shelf.Note: I am lead author of "Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People" and a workforce futurist. With my understanding of what is coming in the job market, I'd recommend this book to everyone who wants to take advantage of

Great gift to family members or friends!

This book is filled with useful strategies and tips, exercises, and inspirational case studies. I am giving it as Christmas gifts to family and friends --just graduated to those who are in extended job searches.This book is unique in that it guides you on how to incorporate your spouses and significant others in your career decisions, how to take risks, breaks, and recession proof your career for a lifetime. I especially enjoyed the in-depth chapter on how to develop a job search or career change action plan. Wow! Easy and interesting reading.