Just finished reading Work It!, as it seemed a good time to do so. Contemplating a move to the SF Bay Area means needing to look for a job and the last time out the gate, it was pretty okay but the time before that was appalling. I've picked up a lot of good tips from it, things that I used to know and things that I never really understood very well. It's highly readable, akin to an easily digested security whitepaper, with lots of examples, quotes reflecting real life experience and tips from job seekers who succeeded, and some who failed.
It's got a chapter on the all important practices of networking, how to make contacts, nurture them, help them along, and have them help you in your quest. I picked up some great tips from this and might even consider becoming sociable because of it. Being surly is more fun, obviously, but it probably doesn't endear me to others the way solicitude might.
There's some great tips for sharpening a resume, which has me aghast at the state of my resume. [No link to it, here, it's just that awful. I'll put it back up when it sucks less.] From contact information to paperweight, this is a good chapter for me. I hope to see the work I'll put in to my resume pay off, and I'm confident it can.
Interviewing is another chapter, as is salary negotiation. The basic tip comes down to, "Know what you want, and make sure everything you say and do reinforces why you should have it." But Allison Hemming goes in to much more detail, so you should probably still buy the book or at least pick it up off the shelves and riffle through it. Maybe you'll get even more out of it than I did and will have cause to wonder how I could read so many words and not remember so many of them.
Each chapter finishes with a section of things you should have learned and can immediately turn around and apply to improve your job situation.
There are chapters on being a new college graduate [I wish!] and on facing layoffs, how to not starve while looking for a job, all that good stuff. It's a bit under three hundred pages and well-organized. I'll be loaning this one out and dog-earring it.
posted at 09:24 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link
