Semi Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: Three authors team up to create a career coaching guide urging readers to examine lifestyle, goals, and how content they are with their current career path or job. This resource proves to be a handy guide with easy to follow exercises. The authors have created a deep dive that goes beyond the resume, asking readers to seriously consider their right fit for a job.
Prose: Well-written and nicely structured, the book offers a story as well as exercises to consider when looking for the perfect job. The tone is conversational, and the authors deliver an abundance of helpful guidance.
Originality: Access to the book's exercises is through a website or QR code, which allows readers useful options—and the encouragement to self-reflect throughout gives the guide an edge.
Character/Execution: The authors have a unique approach to what readers should consider when looking for a job, and it's evident they speak from hard-earned experience. Their advice has been perfected through coaching clients, and the guidance moves beyond just landing a job to remaining satisfied with a career.
Date Submitted: January 30, 2023
This conversational yet extensive career-coaching guide lays out a flexible framework to aid readers in finding the perfect job, one suited to an individual’s lifestyle and goals while offering happiness and a sense of fulfillment. In clear, informative detail, Inkpen, Wright, and Mayer present strategies—such as serious self examination about one’s true goals, and exploratory discussions with “connectors” and “decision makers” to help prepare for and target a job search—with the goal of improving the ways people go about landing not just an individual position but building a satisfying career path. Throughout, they emphasize the urgency of feeling confident about the next step, offering warm guidance, inspiring anecdotes, and easy-to-follow exercises and examples to help readers who “need to change something about your career but [are] not sure what exactly to do next.” This resourceful guide’s four phases demonstrate how to discover what one truly wants in a job, how to gain meaningful access to the field one wants to work in, how to be effective in pursuing a specific desirable position, and how to feel certain that the job will prove fulfilling. Writing with the clear-eyed but encouraging tone of supportive coaches, the authors offer a host of practical tips for surveying and entering a field, while pushing readers to identify their needs and aspirations—and how to make themselves candidates that the people with the power to make changes will say yes to.
This book is a vital resource for anyone just entering into the workforce, or readers who find themselves unhappy with their current employment and ready to dare to strive for more. The authors are frank about facing the risk of making a change and offer pointers about making “modest investments” in career growth, getting the most out of networking conversations, acquiring “access capital,” and—crucially—crafting proposals that decision makers won’t be able to resist. All that demands understanding both your self and your field. The authors point the way.
Takeaway: An informative guide on job searching, networking, and ensuring a position is the right fit.
Great for fans of: Carson Tate’s Own it. Love it. Make it Work., Aliza Knox and Wendy Paris’s Don't Quit Your Day Job.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
