How'd You Score That Gig?: A Guide to the Coolest Jobs-and How to Get Them - Couverture souple

Levit, Alexandra

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0345496299 ISBN 13 : 9780345496294

Editeur : Ballantine Books, 2008

Synopsis

In How’d You Score That Gig?, career expert Alexandra Levit profiles more than sixty of the coolest careers on the planet–all rated in a national survey by twenty- and thirtysomethings for twenty- and thirtysomethings. To find the jobs that are calling your name, take Levit’s short quiz and discover your “passion profile.” You may be:

• an Adventurer: You’re spontaneous, free-spirited, and you always ready for change = foreign services officer, oceanographer, news correspondent
• a Creator: You’re always looking for a way to express yourself = video game designer, book author, landscape architect
• a Data Head: You have an uncanny knack for gathering and organizing information = computational linguist, meteorologist, urban planner
• an Entrepreneur: You have business savvy and don’t want to be chained to a desk = blogger, boutique owner, inventor
• an Investigator: You excel in science, logic, and learning = futurist, classic-car restorer, field archaeologist
• a Networker: You’re a people person–outgoing and a team player = lobbyist, speechwriter, TV producer
• a Nurturer: Selfless and compassionate, you make a difference one person at a time = physical therapist, life coach, nutritionist

Engaging and practical, the book includes insider accounts of young careerists currently in these jobs and provides specific action steps for breaking in. So before you settle for a position that just isn’t you, shake it up–and land the career of your dreams!

"Alexandra Levit's new book, How'd You Score That Gig?, is chock full of research, offers a rare glimpse into the privileged world of those who hold the jobs that other people covet, and provides the roadmap for readers to pursue fields that they might have considered out of reach. Don't hop blindly from career to career looking for one that suits you. Use this book as a guide to tell you what it's like before you make a wrong turn." --Penelope Trunk, author, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success
"First, Alexandra Levit broadens your imagination about what kinds of careers are possible, and then after tantalizing you, she provides specific tips for breaking into the field. Enormously valuable!"
--Ben Casnocha, author, My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley
"This is a cool, unusual, and truly useful book. In my career coaching practice, the number one issue my younger clients face is having the strong desire to do something different work-wise with little knowledge about what jobs exist and how to find them. Alexandra Levit’s guide organizes passion into seven profiles and describes specific jobs within them. A real gem in the book is the innumerable resources listed to help readers learn more about the jobs that strike their fancy. Buy this book!”--Julie Jansen, author, I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This
"Alexandra Levit has written an ideal book for all those adults who still don't know what they want to do when they grow up. The practical self-assessment that opens the book could point even the most indecisive person toward a realistic and satisfying career path. While reading about the dozens of coolest gigs that are thoroughly researched and attractively presented in this book, I almost started second-guessing my own career choices. Good thing I’ve already scored a cool gig!"--Tom Musbach, Editor, Yahoo! HotJobs
“Reading this is like having your own career counselor on call. It is, without doubt, the #1 book for anyone who’s unhappy in their job, confused about what to do next, or just wonders if they’re in the best career for them. I am giving a copy to every new college grad on my list. In fact, I’m giving one to every high school grad I know too.”--Barbara Stanny, author, Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Alexandra Levit is a nationally recognized business and workplace author and speaker. A syndicated columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a blogger for HuffingtonPost.com, Alexandra has authored several books, including the popular They Don't Teach Corporate in College, How'd You Score That Gig?, and Success for Hire.  Alexandra makes frequent national media appearances and has been featured in thousands of outlets including the New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, ABC News, Fox News, CNBC, the Associated Press, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Fortune, and her articles regularly appear on the home pages of CNN, MSN, and Yahoo!.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Introduction
 
If you spend time talking to twenty- and thirtysomethings working today, you’ll unfortunately hear some unhappy stories. Far too many people hold jobs they don’t particularly care about. They commute to work every day and arrive home eight to twelve hours later without a clear sense of where they’ve been, where they are going, or why. In 2004, after I published a book called They Don’t Teach Corporate in College, I traveled to universities and corporations around the United States and heard these stories firsthand. The situation left me wondering: How did all of these smart, ambitious, goal-directed young people end up in dead-end or passionless careers?
 
I believe that part of the answer lies in the college recruiting scene. No matter who you are and what school you’re graduating from, the story is usually the same. Despite a major that you thought was going to prepare you for a career in the real world, by the time you’re a senior you still have no idea what you want to do with your life. You visit the campus career center and are introduced to a bevy of consulting and banking firms and Fortune 500 staples. You don’t want to go to graduate school right away and might not know what to go to graduate school for, so you interview for these jobs and inevitably accept one. You become like every other college student graduating in America today, and before you know it, you’re on a career path that may not have anything to do with your true calling.
 
For previous generations, this setup worked out well enough. They accepted college recruiting for what it was, and to some extent felt that a meaningful career meant a healthy, steady paycheck and not much else. We twenty- and thirtysomethings today, though, are rather different in our expectations regarding job satisfaction. Our parents carefully nurtured our talents and self-esteem from babyhood and told us we could be anything we wanted to be. As adults, our career desires are directed toward finding meaningful work that helps others. In essence, we want to be “paid volunteers,” to join an organization not because we have to, but because we want to, because it allows us to do something significant with our lives. We’re highly concerned with our professional development and want to have the opportunity to make a significant impact at a young age.
 
Unfortunately, the college recruiting system isn’t changing quickly enough to meet our needs, and even after we’ve gone through the process and possibly even accepted a position, many graduates yearn for a solution outside the typical channels. We want to discover the hidden road, the one that leads to an exciting, unique, and fulfilling line of work, the one taken by a select few who always get asked the question, “How’d you score that gig?” We long to have a job that makes us love getting up in the morning, a job that has our friends talking enviously at their Friday night happy hour gatherings. That’s where this book comes in. How’d You Score That Gig? is for you, the twenty- or thirtysomething who wants to find and travel that hidden road of your dreams.
 
The book features sixty cool jobs you may never have thought about pursuing, divided into seven categories based on the broad personality types that are generally best suited to those jobs. I selected the cool jobs via an online survey in which I asked nearly five hundred twenty- and thirtysomethings to tell me about their dream careers. Based on the responses, I generated a list of the top sixty careers and constructed a fairly comprehensive profile of each using the information I gathered from written sources and in-depth interviews with more than a hundred individuals currently holding the jobs. Then, I researched various personality-type measures to develop my seven “passion profiles”—adventurer, creator, data-head, entrepreneur, investigator, networker, and nurturer—and placed the sixty cool jobs into the appropriate categories. In the first chapter, I provide an assessment to help you decide which passion profiles (and therefore which jobs) might be most appealing to you. However, though you may be tempted to skip ahead to your own passion profile, I hope that you will be sufficiently intrigued to read the entire book, because you never know what might spark your interest and prompt you to go out and learn more about a particular job. My goal in writing How’d You Score That Gig? was to offer a true insider’s glimpse into each and every one of these careers, and to provide you with critical advice you simply can’t get in your run-of-the-mill job-reference book—especially as it pertains to how you’d go about getting a job in that field. Congratulations on having the courage to embark on the journey toward career fulfillment. I promise it will be worthwhile.
 
 
 

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Ballantine Books
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0345496299
• ISBN 13: 9780345496294
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible